1. Patrick Partin What just happened?
Creating your own real-time dashboard with Grafana, Influx, and Telegraf
Congratulations on successfully downloading this slide deck! Inside is valuable information, and since there’s absolutely no cost other than your time, why not try it out?

2. Session Agenda Influx Telegraf Grafana
Install and Configure it to store your data
Telegraf
Install and Configure to pull and push to Influx
Grafana
Install and Configure to pull from Influx
Create a few simple Dashboards
Create an Alert that when triggered, posts to Slack
Note to Self - Before you get started, extract that Grafana.zip because it has like 15k tiny files and depending on the day, might take 2 mins unlike the others.
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3. Background Patrick Partin Admin, Architect, DBA, Developer, Engineer
Manager of Data and Systems Infrastructure at SmartDrive
@GingerDBA – Twitter
@Paddyrick – SQLCommunity.Slack.com
You could go on and on, but they’re here for the information, not the backstory.
Shut up, move on.
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4. Please Support Our Sponsors
SQL Saturday in Los Angeles is made possible with the generous support of these sponsors.
You can support them by opting-in and visiting them in the sponsor area.
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5. Orange County User Group Orange County Power BI User Group
Regional Local User Groups
LA Data Platform
(a.k.a. SQL Malibu)
3rd Wednesday of each month
ladataplatform.pass.org - Join us remotely!
L.A. User Group
3rd Thursday of each odd month
sqlla.pass.org
Los Angeles - Korean
Every Other Tuesday
sqlangeles.pass.org
San Diego User Group
1st & 3rd Thursday of each month
meetup.com/sdsqlug
meetup.com/sdsqlbig
Orange County User Group
2rd Thursday of each month
bigpass.pass.org
Orange County Power BI User Group
meetup.com/OC-Power-BI-User-Group/
Sacramento User Group
1st Wednesday of each month
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6. Regional 2019 SQL Saturday events
SQL Saturday in Sacramento
When: August 17, 2019
Where: Patrick Hays Learning Center
#SQLSatSac #SQLSat885
SQL Saturday in San Diego
When: September 21, 2019
Where: San Diego – UCSD Extension Center, University Center
#SQLSatSanDiego #SQLSat909
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7. If you want to follow along…
Influx (April 17th) – 48mb
Telegraf 1.11 (June 11th) – 19mb
Grafana (June 5th) – 52mb
Slack (often?) – 0mb
Today, I will show you this starter set which works, I swear.
The beauty of this, is that it’s so flexible, and can work with anything as you may become more polyglot.
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8. Why are we doing this?
In all seriousness, knowing your data is important. Having the ability to capture, track, and display is relatively easy, and shouldn’t be a blocker to your success.
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9. Data Acquisition
Push/Pull
Data Storage
Time Structured Merge Tree
Data Visualization
Alerting
Monitoring

10. Getting to know our lab, Chooch and Halladay
Connect to Chooch, push Perf Counters
Chooch:8086
Connect to Halladay, grab DMVs
Macbook-Pro:3000
Run Influx queries, pull JSON to display metrics, call Slack
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11. Install InfluxDB
Demo
Pretty much straight out of the box. Run InfluxD.exe in a command prompt window, and the Influx.exe in another.
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12. InfluxDB Quickies CasE SenSITiVe
select * X LIMIT 5 instead of select TOP 5 * X
Influx < - > SQL speak
Measurements < - > Table
Series < - > Columns
Tag – Optional Metadata that’s indexed
Field – Required metadata that’s not indexed
Can’t do epoch conversions in your head?
Precision rfc3339
There is soooooooo much more about this database that I love and wish that I could cover, but 60 minutes only gives so much coverage. Please do go to their website and read their well documented documentation and community forums.
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13. Install Telegraf
Demo
A little less much straight out of the box. Run Telegraf.exe in a command prompt window, but do a little config on the telegraf.conf. Chooch is connecting to Halladay using the mssql input. Halladay will have Telegraf pushing to Chooch with some Perf Counters, including SSAS.
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14. Telegraf Quickies Telegraf can push and pull
We pulled from SQL Server
We pushed SSAS Metrics from the SQL Server
Database was created on the fly
Measurements were created on the fly
typeperf –q
Dumped all of the hosts’s perf counters
These differ between hosts and configurations
This is such a fantastic program, and I cannot stress it enough. This has such amazing community support, amazing to see how much it has grown in just the few years I’ve been doing this talk.
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15. Install Grafana
Demo
This program is so seriously sweet. This space is getting crowded, but it’s awfully hard to find something better.
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16. Grafana Quickies In \conf, copy sample.ini to custom.ini
Uncomment out the port, it defaults to 3000
Know your data!
Ever-increasing counter?
Perhaps Derivative? Non-Negative?
Grab a Slack, it’s free!
This is such a fantastic program, and I cannot stress it enough. This has such amazing community support, amazing to see how much it has grown in just the few years I’ve been doing this talk.
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17. Wrapping it all up - We were able to stand up a server to take metrics
We were able to push and pull metrics from Perf Counters and Inputs
We were able to run some basic queries inside Influx to see how it looked
We were able to create some simple dashboards, and configure thresholds and alerts
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18. More Information - Telegraf does LOTS more than I covered
Grafana has plenty of generic dashboards
SQL Server 2017 Developer Edition (free!)
If serving from Windows, you’ll need NSSM
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19. Not covered, but perhaps helpful
DBATools.io
Powershell pretty much everything
Write into Slack from Powershell
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20. Questions?
If not, catch me after the session, or on the interwebs… Thank you!
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