Grafana: Getting Started

How to Get Started with Grafana

👋 Welcome to the Stackhero documentation!

Stackhero provides you with a ready-to-use Grafana cloud environment, designed for fast setup and reliable performance:

• Unlimited users, dashboards, and alerts: scale your monitoring as needed, with no artificial restrictions.
• A dedicated SMTP email server is included, so you can send as many notifications as you want, with no quotas to monitor.
• One-click plugin installation makes it easy to add new features to Grafana.
• Built-in SSO support for GitLab, GitHub, Google, and any generic OAuth2 provider. User management remains simple and secure.
• One-click updates keep your Grafana instance up to date, with no downtime or maintenance headaches.
• Use your own custom domain with automated HTTPS provisioning for secure, branded access (for example, https://grafana.your-company.com).
• High performance and enhanced security are included by default, running on your own private, dedicated infrastructure.

Get started faster and save time on setup: a secure Grafana cloud hosting instance is ready in about 5 minutes.

Connecting Grafana to InfluxDB v2

Before you begin, ensure you are using Grafana v7.0.0 or later. Since Stackhero regularly updates its services, this should not be a concern.

Log in to your Grafana web panel and navigate to Configuration / Data sources / Add a data source. Choose the data source labeled "InfluxDB". In the "Query language" dropdown, select "Flux". This step is essential because InfluxDB v2 uses the Flux query language.

Next, provide the URL, organization, and token details (you can refer to the "InfluxDB" / "Getting Started" documentation on the left to learn how to create a token).

InfluxDB data source configuration

Handle error "parse error on line 1, column 1: bare " in non-quoted-field" with InfluxDB v2

If you encounter the error "parse error on line 1, column 1: bare " in non-quoted-field" with Grafana 7.2.0, you can resolve it by editing your data source.

Log in to Grafana, go to your data sources, select "InfluxDB", and update the URL by replacing:

https://<XXXXXX>.stackhero-network.com/api/v2

with

https://<XXXXXX>.stackhero-network.com/

After making this change, click on "Save & test". The connection should now work as expected.

Connecting Grafana to PostgreSQL

Log in to your Grafana web panel and navigate to Configuration / Data sources / Add a data source.

Select the data source labeled "PostgreSQL" and complete the form with the following information:

1. In "Host", enter your PostgreSQL service domain (for example, <XXXXXX>.stackhero-network.com:5432).
2. In "Database", enter your PostgreSQL database name (by default, this is admin).
3. In both "User" and "Password", enter your PostgreSQL credentials (the default user is admin and the password is the one specified in your PostgreSQL service configuration).

PostgreSQL data source configuration

Adding Plugins to Grafana

You can enhance Grafana by adding plugins from Grafana's marketplace. To add a plugin, log in to your Stackhero dashboard, click on "Configure", then "Add a plugin". Next, copy and paste the URL of the plugin you wish to install. For example, if you want to install the "Worldmap Panel" plugin, paste the following URL:

https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins//grafana-worldmap-panel

Example of plugin installation

Enjoy customizing your Grafana experience with these new tools!