Configure and Run Grafana (On Windows)

In this guide we will se how to

A Brief Introduction
Download Grafana
Configure Grafana
Run Grafana (as a Service)
Access Grafana

A Brief Introduction

Grafana is an open-source platform for monitoring that allows to query, visualize and create alerts from data stored in lots of different sources.
Its main components are dashboards, which can be created from scratch or imported, there are lots of official and community-made dashboards ready to use, visit grafana dashboards and have a look at them.
Grafana can run on any platform, Windows, Linux, Docker and Mac.

Download Grafana

To download Grafana follow this link, you will have two options, download the installer or download the standalone binaries.
I will use the standalone binaries.

Once downloaded extract the archive into the desired folder, I will extract it in a folder called “grafana”.

Configure Grafana

It is important to put all the custom configuration in a separate file and not in the default one. The default configuration file “defaults.ini” can be found in the subfolder “conf”.
make a copy of this file and call it “custom.ini”.
The custom configuration will override the default one, Grafana will automatically read the file called “custom.ini”

Edit “custom.ini” and change the http port to 8080 or any other non reserved/occupied value.

# The http port to use
http_port = 8080

The default configuration of Grafana is really nice and you don’t need to change anything else, the log is already written to a rotated file and the basic authentication is already active.
Grafana supports other authentication methods and lots of other configurations (i.e SMTP configuration), you can find all in the docs.

Run Grafana (as a Service)

To run Grafana you just need to execute “grafana-server.exe”.
important: Grafana will create his folder relatively to the working directory, once started it will output the path to the created folders

.\grafana-server.exe

# example of folder path returned once Grafana is running
[32mINFO[0m[11-18|16:13:22] Path Home                                [32mlogger[0m=settings [32mpath[0m=C:\\Projects\\monitoring_sample\\grafana
[32mINFO[0m[11-18|16:13:22] Path Data                                [32mlogger[0m=settings [32mpath[0m=C:\\Projects\\monitoring_sample\\grafana\\data
[32mINFO[0m[11-18|16:13:22] Path Logs                                [32mlogger[0m=settings [32mpath[0m=C:\\Projects\\monitoring_sample\\grafana\\data\\log

To run it as a service use nssm and configure the service

.\nssm.exe install

You can now find “Grafana service” in windows services and run it.
If the startup directory is the subfolder “bin”, Grafana will create the following folders and files:

data
│   grafana.db
│
├───log
│       grafana.log
│
├───plugins
└───png

Access Grafana

To access Grafana head to the configured url, for me http://localhost:8080/login, if you are not sure about the port you can find it in the configuration file or in the log file.

The default user is “admin” with password “admin”, after logging in Grafana will ask you to change that password.

The End

Now Grafana is up and running, I hope you found this guide useful