In this article, I will discuss how you can install and configure Grafana on AWS, which you can use to monitor your server resources. But before that, let’s discuss what is Grafana.

What is Grafana

Grafana is a multi-platform open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources. It is expandable through a plug-in system. End users can create complex monitoring dashboards using interactive query builders.

What is AWS

Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis.

First, create an EC2 instance.

Then run the following commands to Install and Configure Grafana on AWS. Let me explain each line one by one.

The first line is sudo yum update -y. Using this command we are updating YUM. YUM (Yellowdog Updater Modified) is an open-source command line as well as a graphical-based package management tool for RPM (RedHat Package Manager) based Linux systems. It allows users and system administrators to easily install, update, remove, or search software packages on a system. So sudo yum update -y updates all packages to the latest version from a repository list which is managed by Amazon for Amazon Linux 1. This is always a good practice to run “yum update” first before you install any software.

sudo yum install docker -y 

After updating the package list, let’s try to run this command to pull the Grafana image.

sudo docker pull grafana/grafana

Next, we execute this command to run the Grafana image on port 8080

sudo docker run --name grafana-aws -d -p 8080:3000 grafana/grafana

If you have come so far, then congratulations on installing Grafana on your EC2 instance. Now open the public DNS of your instance with port 8080 and you will see the Graphical interface of Grafana.

Conclusion

Grafana is a nice monitoring tool that we can use to monitor servers easily.