How To Install Grafana 8 on Debian 11/10/9

In this post, I’ll walk you through the installation of Grafana 8 on Debian 11/10/9. Grafana v8 is out and it can be installed on Ubuntu, Debian and Red Hat based Linux distributions from official Grafana package repositories.

Grafana is an open source tool which allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored. It enables you to easily create, explore, and share dashboards with your team and foster a data-driven culture.

What is new in Grafana 8.0?

• 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.

For CentOS 7, check: How to Install Grafana on CentOS 7

Step 1: Update Debian system

Ensure your Ubuntu / Debian system is up to date.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo reboot

Step 2: Add Grafana 8 APT repository

Add Grafana gpg key which allows you to install signed packages.

sudo apt-get install -y gnupg2 curl
curl https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -

Then install Grafana 8 APT repository:

sudo add-apt-repository "deb https://packages.grafana.com/oss/deb stable main"

If your system is missing , check How to Install add-apt-repository on Debian / Ubuntu

Once the repository is added, proceed to update your Apt repositories and install Grafana 8 on Debian 11/10/9.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install grafana

Start grafana service.

sudo systemctl start grafana-server

The grafana-service should now be running.

$ systemctl status grafana-server
 grafana-server.service - Grafana instance
 Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/grafana-server.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
 Active: active (running) since Thu 2019-04-18 10:49:09 PDT; 1min 38s ago
  Docs: http://docs.grafana.org
 Main PID: 4064 (grafana-server)
 Tasks: 10 (limit: 1110)
 CGroup: /system.slice/grafana-server.service
        `-4064 /usr/sbin/grafana-server --config=/etc/grafana/grafana.ini --pidfile=/var/run/grafana/grafana-server.pid --packaging=deb cfg:defa 
.....

Ensure the service is set to run on boot.

sudo systemctl enable grafana-server

Step 3: Access Grafana 6 UI on Debian 11/10/9

Once the service has been started, you can access its web dashboard by visiting the server IP on port 3000.

If you have an active firewall, mostly ufw, allow port 3000 on the firewall.

sudo ufw allow proto tcp from any to any port 3000

Now open your browser and enter server IP address and port 3000.

Default logins are:

Username: admin
Password: admin

But you’re required to change immediately after authenticating.

Grafana Package details:

• Installs binary to /usr/sbin/grafana-server
• Installs Init.d script to /etc/init.d/grafana-server
• Creates default file (environment vars) to /etc/default/grafana-server
• Installs configuration file to /etc/grafana/grafana.ini
• Installs systemd service (if systemd is available) name grafana-server.service
• The default configuration sets the log file at /var/log/grafana/grafana.log
• The default configuration specifies a sqlite3 db at /var/lib/grafana/grafana.db
• Installs HTML/JS/CSS and other Grafana files at /usr/share/grafana

The systemd service file and init.d script both use environment vars on the file located at /etc/default/grafana-server.

Next steps include looking at Adding data sources

Step 4: Monitoring with Grafana

See our sample guides on how you can monitor your infrastructure using Grafana.