Using InfluxDB + Grafana to Display Network Statistics
I loathe MRTG graphs. They were cool in 2000, but now they’re showing their age. We have much better visualisation tools available, and we don’t need to be so aggressive with aggregating old data. I’ve been working with InfluxDB + Grafana recently. Much cooler, much more flexible. Here’s a walk-through on setting up InfluxDB + Grafana, collecting network throughput data, and displaying it.
Background – InfluxDB + Grafana
There’s three parts to this:
- Grafana: This is our main UI. Grafana is a “…graph and dashboard builder for visualizing time series metrics.” It makes it easy to create dashboards for displaying time-series data. It works with several different data sources such as Graphite, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, and OpenTSDB.
- InfluxDB: This is where we store the data that Grafana displays. InfluxDB is “…an open-source distributed time series database with no external dependencies.” It’s a relatively new project, and is not quite at 1.0 yet, but it shows a lot of promise. It can be used in place of Graphite. It is very flexible, and can store events as well as time series data.
- Influxsnmp: We need to get data from the network into InfluxDB. There are a few options for Continue reading