How to install Grafana+InfluxDB on the Raspberry Pi

InfluxDB is an easy to use open-source time series database developed by InfluxData. It is written in Go and optimized for fast, high-availability storage and retrieval of time series data in fields such as operations monitoring, application metrics, Internet of Things sensor data, and real-time analytics. It also has support for processing data from Graphite. A time series database have the series records always associated with a timestamp. You can provide the timestamp with the measurement data or the Influx database will generate it itself.

Grafana is an open source, feature rich metrics dashboard and graph editor for Graphite, Elasticsearch, OpenTSDB, Prometheus and InfluxDB.

Combining Influxdb+Grafana makes an easy to use database and a very flexible and good-looking dashboard for your next Raspberry Pi datalogger project.

TCP port 8086 is used for client-server communication over InfluxDB’s HTTP API.
TCP port 8088 is used for the RPC service for backup and restore.
In addition to the ports above, InfluxDB also offers multiple plugins that may require custom ports. All port mappings can be modified through the configuration file, which is located at /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf for default installations.

InfluxDB installation instructions on Raspberry Pi:

#1. Add the InfluxData repository configuration by using the following commands:

Note: After hitting enter on some commands, a new prompt appears and nothing else is displayed. In the Command Line Interface, CLI, this means the statement was executed and there were no errors to display. There will always be an error displayed if something went wrong. No news is good news!
Copy the following commands to your CLI and hit enter. Your installed version on Raspian will be evaluated and the correct version will be added to your /etc/apt/sources.list.d.

wget -qO- https://repos.influxdata.com/influxdb.key | sudo apt-key add -
source /etc/os-release
test $VERSION_ID = "7" && echo "deb https://repos.influxdata.com/debian wheezy stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/influxdb.list
test $VERSION_ID = "8" && echo "deb https://repos.influxdata.com/debian jessie stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/influxdb.list
test $VERSION_ID = "9" && echo "deb https://repos.influxdata.com/debian stretch stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/influxdb.list

#2.Install InfluxDB from the repository prevuously added in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/influxdb.list

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install influxdb

#3. Start the InfluxDB service:

sudo service influxdb start

InfluxDB configuration

The system has internal defaults for every configuration file setting. View the default configuration settings with the influxd config command. Most of the settings in the local configuration file (/etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf) are commented out. All commented-out settings will be determined by the internal defaults. Any uncommented settings in the local configuration file override the internal defaults. Note that the local configuration file does not need to include every configuration setting. There are two ways to launch InfluxDB with your configuration file:
Point the process to the correct configuration file by using the -config option:

influxd -config /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf

Set the environment variable INFLUXDB_CONFIG_PATH to the path of your configuration file and start the process.
For example:

echo $INFLUXDB_CONFIG_PATH /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf

influxd

InfluxDB first checks for the -config option and then for the environment variable. See the Configuration documentation for more information.

To configure the InfluxDB first open the config file in the text editor nano:

sudo nano /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf

I did the following configuration in the /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf file:

Configure the HTTP endpoint to get data in and out of InfluxDB:
(Edit the following rows by removing the “#” tag.)

Restart InfluxDB after modifying the file: ​

sudo service influxdb restart

Test the InfluxDB installation

Open the Raspberry web browser and type:

Instead of writing “localhost” in the address field you could enter the real IP address of your raspberry Pi: Example: 192.168.1.101:8086. If you don’t know the IP address you, can easily find if by using the bash command

sudo hostname -I

If it works,you should see the following html page:

Yes, that’s right, on port 8086 you will see a 404 page. The browser will complain: “This site could not be reached” if the database is not found.

You could also try to run the Influxdb command shell by typing

influx

in the terminal.
When you see this response you know that it is working:

Type

exit

to get out of the Influx shell.

Before you dive into InfluxDB, it’s good to get acquainted with some of the key concepts of the database. This document provides a gentle introduction to those concepts and common InfluxDB terminology. With InfluxDB installed, you’re ready to start doing some awesome things. Getting started guide here.

Grafana installation instructions on RaspberryPi:

Check commands in Grafana for ARM, in case there is a new version available.

#1. Update your apt source

For Raspberry pi 1, and Raspberry Pi Zero W, use:

wget https://dl.grafana.com/oss/release/grafana-rpi_6.2.2_armhf.deb 
sudo dpkg -i grafana-rpi_6.2.2_armhf.deb

For Raspberry pi 2, and Raspberry Pi 3, 3B, 3B+, use:

wget https://dl.grafana.com/oss/release/grafana_6.2.2_armhf.deb 
sudo dpkg -i grafana_6.2.2_armhf.deb

#2. Update available packages and Install Grafana

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grafana

#3. Start the server (init.d service)

Start Grafana by running:

sudo service grafana-server start

This will start the grafana-server process as the grafana user, which was created during the package installation. The default HTTP port is 3000 and default user and group is admin.

To configure the Grafana server to start at boot time:

sudo update-rc.d grafana-server defaults

#4. Test the Grafana installation

Open the Raspberry Chromium web browser and type:

You will then see the Grafana login page:

You made it!

You’ve sucessfully installed Influxdb and Grafana on your Raspberry Pi supercomputer. If you’re just starting out, we recommend taking a look at Grafana well made documentation for Basic Concept and Getting Started guides.
Other related useful information can be found here:
Using InfluxDB in Grafana
InfluxDb api client libraries for Python, C, Perl etc.