How To Install Grafana 8 on CentOS 8 / RHEL 8

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How can I install Grafana 8 on RHEL 8 / CentOS 8?. This guide will walk you through the installation of Grafana on RHEL / CentOS 8. Grafana is a free and open source feature-rich graph editor & metrics dashboard for various data sources such as Elasticsearch, Graphite, OpenTSDB, Prometheus, and InfluxDB.

We have other installation guides for Grafana, choose one for your Linux distribution.

Install Grafana 8 on RHEL 8 / CentOS 8

Grafana can be installed on RHEL / CentOS 8 from YUM repository or by manually downloading and installing .rpm package. The former is preferred method since it is easy to update and uninstall Grafana with the yum package manager.

Some new features in Grafana 8 are:

  • Library panels: Allow users to build panels that can be used in multiple dashboards
  • Prometheus metrics browser: Allows you to quickly find metrics and select relevant labels to build basic queries.
  • Grafana v8.0 alerts: Centralizes alerting information for Grafana managed alerts and alerts from Prometheus-compatible data sources in one UI and API.
  • Real-time streaming: Data sources can now send real-time updates to dashboards over a websocket connection
  • Bar chart visualization: A new visualization that supports categorical data
  • Histogram visualization: This hidden feature of the old Graph panel is now a standalone visualization
  • State timeline visualization: The State timeline visualization shows discrete state changes over time
  • Time series visualization out of Beta and is now graduating to a stable state
  • Download logs: When you inspect a panel, you can now download log results as a text (.txt) file.

Step 1: Add Grafana 8 YUM repository

Run the commands below as user with sudo privileges or as root user to add repository content.

cat <

You can optionally update you cache index for available packages:

sudo dnf makecache

Step 2: Install Grafana 8 on CentOS 8 / RHEL 8

When repository for Grafana has been configured, Grafana can be easily installed by running the commands below:

sudo dnf -y install grafana

Package info:

$ rpm -qi grafana
Name        : grafana
Version     : 8.4.6
Release     : 1
Architecture: x86_64
Install Date: Wed Apr 20 10:13:04 2022
Group       : default
Size        : 251112361
License     : AGPLv3
Signature   : RSA/SHA256, Mon Apr  4 10:04:18 2022, Key ID 8c8c34c524098cb6
Source RPM  : grafana-8.4.6-1.src.rpm
Build Date  : Mon Apr  4 10:03:45 2022
Build Host  : 6c96bd4ba151
Relocations : /
Packager    : [email protected]
Vendor      : Grafana
URL         : https://grafana.com
Summary     : Grafana
Description :
Grafana

Step 3: Start Grafana Service

Grafana service is managed by systemd. Start the service and enable it to start on boot.

$ sudo systemctl enable --now grafana-server.service 
 Synchronizing state of grafana-server.service with SysV service script with /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-sysv-install.
 Executing: /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-sysv-install enable grafana-server
 Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/grafana-server.service → /usr/lib/systemd/system/grafana-server.service.

The default port used is 3000. If you have another process using this port, you’ll need to set custom port in Grafana configuration file /etc/grafana/grafana.ini.

http_port = 3000

Your grafana-server service should show running state.

$ systemctl status grafana-server.service 
  grafana-server.service - Grafana instance
    Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/grafana-server.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
    Active: active (running) since Thu 2019-01-10 23:18:24 EAT; 3min 12s ago
      Docs: http://docs.grafana.org
  Main PID: 2974 (grafana-server)
     Tasks: 9 (limit: 11510)
    Memory: 17.3M
    CGroup: /system.slice/grafana-server.service
            └─2974 /usr/sbin/grafana-server --config=/etc/grafana/grafana.ini --pidfile=/var/run/grafana/grafana-server.pid --packaging=rpm cfg:default>
 Jan 10 23:18:24 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Initializing CleanUpService" logger=server
 Jan 10 23:18:24 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Initializing NotificationService" logger=server
 Jan 10 23:18:24 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Initializing ProvisioningService" logger=server
 Jan 10 23:18:24 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Initializing PluginManager" logger=server
 Jan 10 23:18:24 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Starting plugin search" logger=plugins
 Jan 10 23:18:24 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Plugin dir created" logger=plugins dir=/var/lib/grafana/plu>
 Jan 10 23:18:24 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Initializing TracingService" logger=server
 Jan 10 23:18:24 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="Initializing Stream Manager"
 Jan 10 23:18:24 rhel8.local grafana-server[2974]: t=2019-01-10T23:18:24+0300 lvl=info msg="HTTP Server Listen" logger=http.server address=0.0.0.0:3000>
 Jan 10 23:18:24 rhel8.local systemd[1]: Started Grafana instance.

By default, Grafana will write logs to /var/log/grafana directory and its SQLite database is located under /var/lib/grafana/grafana.db

Step 4: Open firewall port for Grafana

If you have a running firewalld service, allow port 3000for access to the dashboard from the network:

sudo firewall-cmd --add-port=3000/tcp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Step 5: Access Grafana Dashboard

Grafana web dashboard is accessible on http://[Server IP|Hostname]:3000

install-grafana-rhel-8-centos-8-01

The default logins are:

username: admin
Password: admin

Change admin password in the next window.

install-grafana-rhel-8-centos-8-02

Now that you have Grafana installed in your RHEL 8 server

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