Setup Grafana in Windows

• Go to Grafana website and download Grafana installer from Products section at https://grafana.com/grafana/download
• Select the edition as OSS (Open Source Software) and select the version from the drop down menus
• Download the windows Grafana installer
• Run the installer to install Grafana

Access Grafana in browser for first use

• Grafana by default runs on port 3000. So it can opened in the browser at http://localhost:3000. The login screen will appear

• The default username is admin and password is admin. Change the password to a better one after logging in with default password
• A home page as shown below should be displayed after logging in

Restart, Stop, Disable Grafana windows service

• Grafana runs as a windows background service
• Hence the Grafana service can be restarted, stopped or disabled from the Services app of Windows
• The Services app can be opened using the command services.msc in a command line or directly searching for the app “Services”
• Grafana is located in the services list with the name “Grafana”
• The start up behavior of Grafana can also be changed from the properties of the service by double clicking the service in the list

View Grafana logs

• Grafana logs are stored in C:\Program Files\GrafanaLabs\grafana\data\log folder
• These logs can be useful to debug the errors in Grafana installation

Change Theme, Timezone, Organization name

• In Grafana portal, search for Preferences section in the search bar and open the Default Preferences page
• Change the Organization name, Timezone, Dark or Light theme in this preferences page

Configure Grafana

• Grafana can be configured with the configuration file located at C:\Program Files\GrafanaLabs\grafana\conf\defaults.ini file

• There are many sections in the defaults.ini file for configuring grafana

  Configure Grafana port, IP address, protocol, domain name, SSL

  • This can be configured in the [server] section of the defaults.ini file

  Configure Grafana database

  • By default, Grafana uses an sqlite database for storing its data. This can be changed or managed in the [database] section of the default.ini file

  Configure Grafana security aspects like default admin credentials, admin email, encryption key

  • This can be configured in the [security] section of the defaults.ini file

  Configure Grafana mail server

  • This can be configured in the [smtp] section of the defaults.ini file
  • Grafana uses this settings to send emails for various purposes like email alerts

  Configure logs generated by Grafana

  • This can be configured in the [log] section of the defaults.ini file

Create Dashboards in Grafana

• Open Dashboards page from search bar or from the left menu
• Click the New dashboard button to create a new dashboard
• Add Visualizations to the dashboard and save the dashboard

Install Grafana plugins with grafana-cli

• Grafana plugins can be installed from command line using grafana-cli.exe located in C:\Program Files\GrafanaLabs\grafana\bin folder
• Open a command line the bin folder and run the command grafana-cli.exe plugins install <plugin-id>
• The plugin-id can be found by searching for plugins at https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins
• For example Grafana Image Renderer plugin can be installed using the command grafana-cli.exe plugins install grafana-image-renderer
• A plugin can be removed using the command grafana-cli.exe plugins remove <plugin-id>

Uninstall Grafana

• Grafana can be uninstalled just like other programs in the Control panel
• After un-installation, the folder C:\Program Files\GrafanaLabs can also be deleted

Video

Video on this post can be seen here

References

• Grafana configuration file docs - https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/setup-grafana/configure-grafana/
• grafana-cli plugins docs - https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/cli/#plugins-commands