Grafana on Windows Powered by GlobalSolutions

Grafana is an open-source solution for running data analytics, pulling up metrics that make sense of massive amounts of data, and monitoring your apps with the help of cool customizable dashboards. Grafana connects with every possible data source, commonly referred to as databases such as Graphite, Prometheus, InfluxDB, ElasticSearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and more. We have installed and configured Prometheus, WMI Exporter, and Grafana so you can subscribe and start using it right away.

Grafana also enables you to write plugins from scratch for integration with several different data sources. The tool helps you study, analyze, and monitor data over a period of time — technically called time-series analytics. It helps track user behavior, application behavior, frequency of errors in production or pre-production environments, type of errors, and contextual scenarios by providing relative data.

Accessing Your AMI from AWS Marketplace

To get started with your Grafana stack:

1. Subscribe: Purchase the Grafana AMI from the AWS Marketplace.
2. Connect via RDP:
   • In the AWS Console, select your launched instance and click Connect.
   • Choose RDP Client, upload your .pem key file, and decrypt the password using your private key.
   • Download the .rdp file and connect using the username Administrator and the decrypted password.

Installation Paths and Versions

All applications are configured as a Windows service and start automatically when the instance launches:

Application	Location
Prometheus	C:\prometheus
Prometheus Configuration	C:\prometheus\prometheus.yml
Grafana	C:\grafana

Usage Instructions

We have installed Prometheus, Grafana, and the Windows Node Exporter. This solution helps you get going right away with no time spent installing or configuring applications. All applications have been configured as a service — once you start the instance, all you have to do is open the prometheus.yml file and start adding your targets. As you add targets, metrics will start flowing and you can view them in either Prometheus or Grafana.

Below are key definitions to help you get started:

• Target — The resource you want to monitor.
• Exporter — A Prometheus client that emits metrics as an endpoint to Prometheus.
• prometheus.yml — The configuration file where you specify the targets you want to monitor.
• Grafana — Reads metrics from Prometheus to graph your data.

Pre-configured Dashboard

We have created a dashboard in Grafana to graph metrics from Prometheus and the EC2 instance where Prometheus is running. The Windows Node Exporter is installed on the EC2 instance and emits metrics on port 9182. The following section in prometheus.yml refers to this configuration:

- job_name: 'EC2_Instance'
    # metrics_path defaults to '/metrics'
    # scheme defaults to 'http'
    static_configs:
    - targets: ['localhost:9182']

The Grafana Dashboard displays the following metrics for the instance: uptime, CPU, memory, network, disk usage, system load, and more. Using this as a sample, you can install the appropriate exporter for different targets and have Prometheus scrape them.

Accessing Grafana

Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000.

Accessing Prometheus

Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:9090 to access the Prometheus query interface directly.

AWS Cost Optimizer — CloudInsider

Our other popular offering is the AWS Cost Optimizer aka CloudInsider, available in AWS Marketplace. This service has helped our customers save significantly on AWS and other cloud spending. It is easy to subscribe and you can see the savings in minutes.

▶ Watch Demo Video Subscribe on AWS Marketplace

Support

For any questions or assistance with our AWS Marketplace offering, reach out to us at support@theglobalsolutions.net.