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Monitoring Raspberry Pi With Dashboard

One of the interesting things one can do with their RaspberryPi is setting up a monitoring dashboard. For this we use Grafana (a dashboard service), InfluxDB (the database) and collectd (a metric collection service).

Updating and Upgrading

Down to your basics, update and upgrade your system first

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sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

InfluxDB

Installing InfluxDB

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sudo apt install influxdb influxdb-client

Fiddling with Configuration

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sudo nano /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf

The values of the directories are going to be changed to tmp so that values are stored in RAM.

End result should look like this

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[meta]
dir = "/tmp/influxdb/meta"

# ABRIDGED

[data]
dir = "/tmp/influxdb/data"
wal-dir = "/tmp/influxdb/wal"

Now we will bind our data to localhost only.

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[http]
enabled = true
bind-address = "127.0.0.1:8086"

Changing collectd configuration

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[[collectd]]
enabled = true
port = 25826
database = "collectd_db"
typesdb = "/usr/share/collectd/types.db"

Done! Now we will run the following code to enable and start InfluxDB

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sudo systemctl enable influxdb
sudo systemctl start influxdb

If you now run influx in your terminal you should see it work!

Run these commands

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CREATE DATABASE collectd_db
CREATE RETENTION POLICY "twentyfour_hours" ON "collectd_db" DURATION 24h REPLICATION 1 DEFAULT

"twentyfour_hours is the name of the policy, should you want to delete it later. the REPLICATION directive is only relevant for clustered systems but must be set nonetheless. Here, we only want one copy of our data.

Press CTRL + D to exit the influx prompt, and start with the next step."

collectd

Installing collectd -

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sudo apt install collectd collectd-utils

Once again, open the configuration file /etc/collectd/collectd.conf and ensure the following settings are not commented out: (Usually they aren't commented out but just check)

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Hostname "microserver314"

Interval 60
LoadPlugin syslog
LoadPlugin cpu
LoadPlugin cpufreq
LoadPlugin df
LoadPlugin disk
LoadPlugin entropy
LoadPlugin interface
LoadPlugin irq
LoadPlugin load
LoadPlugin memory
LoadPlugin network
LoadPlugin processes
LoadPlugin swap
LoadPlugin thermal
LoadPlugin users

What does all this mean?? The individual plugin report:

  1. cpufreq: the CPU frequency
  2. df: available disk space
  3. entropy: available entropy for (pseudo) random number generation
  4. interface: transmitted and received bytes on the network interfaces
  5. irq: number of times the interrupt handler of the OS has been called
  6. load: CPU load averages
  7. memory: available and used main memory
  8. network: write data to network servers
  9. processes: number of processes and their state
  10. swap: size and usage of the swap partition
  11. thermal: CPU temperature
  12. users: number of logged in users (via SSH, …)

Now that the plugins are loaded, we must configure some of them individually:

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<Plugin df>
# This will ignore uninteresting file systems
# to keep our DB from cluttering
    FSType rootfs
    FSType sysfs
    FSType proc
    FSType devpts
    FSType tmpfs
    FSType fusectl
    FSType cgroup
    Ignore Selected true
</Plugin>

<Plugin "syslog">
# Skip messages with info label
    LogLevel "warning"
</Plugin>

Finally, we must tell collectd where to write all the data. We will set it to the host and port of InfluxDB’s collectd listener:

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<Plugin "network">
    Server "127.0.0.1" "25826"
</Plugin>

Finally making it work!

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sudo systemctl enable collectd
sudo systemctl start collectd

Testing The Data

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influxdb
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USE collectd_db
SELECT * FROM processes_value WHERE ("type_instance" = 'sleeping') ORDER BY time DESC LIMIT 1
If you get an output you are good to go!

Grafana

Finally we install the dashboard To add the Grafana APT key to your Raspberry Pi’s keychain, run the following command

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curl https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/grafana-archive-keyrings.gpg >/dev/null
With the key added, we can now safely add the Grafana repository to our Pi’s list of packages sources.

Use the following command on your Raspberry Pi to add the repository to the list.

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echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/grafana-archive-keyrings.gpg] https://packages.grafana.com/oss/deb stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list

Finally updating our Pi

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sudo apt update

And installing it

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sudo apt install grafana

Enabling and starting the Grafana service

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sudo systemctl enable grafana-server
sudo systemctl start grafana-server

Now open Grafana using your host IP address and on port 3000. The password and username for the dashboard is admin.

Note - Do not like port 3000 or another service is utilizing it? Change the port in /etc/grafana/grafana.ini you have to change in /usr/share/grafana/conf/defaults.ini.

Remove the semicolon in /usr/share/grafana/conf/defaults.ini and chance the port! You're good to go!

Finally

  1. Open Grafana and if not prompted, head to settings (the gear icon) and click on Data Sources
  2. Add the data source as InfluxDB as given below

Top Page Bottom Page

Done! Now just save and test! If it works you are 95% done!

Getting the beautiful output

Head over to the + sign and Import this and you shall now be seeing an output!

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