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. Support Our Sponsors
Duh moment of the day, please do support our sponsors. Without them, none of this is possible.
Same for the volunteers

3. Local User Groups Orange County Data Professionals Los Angeles SQL
2nd Thursday of each month
6:30—8:30 PM
Irvine
BigPASS.pass.org
Los Angeles SQL
3rd Thursday of each odd month
7:00—8:30 PM
USC Campus
Sql.la
Orange County Power BI
3rd Thursday of the month
7:00—8:30 PM
Irvine
Meetup.com
Malibu SQL
3rd Wednesday of each month
6:30—9:00 PM
sqlMalibu.pass.org
To whom it may concern:
The San Diego SQL User Group chapter is the best.
Full stop.
San Diego User Groups
1st & 3rd Thursday
6:00—8:30 PM
Los Angeles—Korean
Every other Tuesday
8:00—9:00 PM
El Segundo
sqlAngeles.pass.org

4. Session Agenda Influx Telegraf Grafana
Install and Configure it to store your data
Telegraf
Install and Configure to push and pull to Influx
Grafana
Install and Configure to pull from Influx
Create a few simple Dashboards
Create an Alert that when triggered, posts into Slack
That’s what I hope to accomplish. Here hoping we make it through without too many problems.

5. Session Presenter Patrick Partin
Accidental Admin, Architect, DBA, Developer, Engineer
20+ years experience fixing and sometimes breaking stuff
@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.

6. Let’s Prepare
Note to self: Do try to scare more people away.

7. Want to follow along? Grafana (Grafana Labs) Grafana 6.1.3 (Apr 9)
Grafana (Apr 9)
Serving it in Windows?
NSSM (Non-sucking Service Manager)
Currently needed for Influx and Grafana
Influx + Telegraf (InfluxData)
InfluxDB (Mar 26)
Telegraf (Apr 2)

8. Quick Architectural Overview

9. Time Structured Merge Tree Storage
Data Acquisition
Push/Pull
Time Structured Merge Tree
Storage
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.
Alerting
Monitoring
Visualization Front-end

10. InfluxDB Demo Here goes, don’t mess up.
Dear Hyper-V Gods, please don’t let me fail infront of these fine folks spending their Saturday listening to you babble on.

11. Influx <-> SQL speak – Measurements = table Series = column(s)
Quick terms/recap:
Linux speak –
daemon = Service
Influx <-> SQL speak –
Measurements = table
Series = column(s)
Tag = optional metadata that’s indexed, what we’d use in a where clause
Field = required metadata that is not indexed, what we’d use as an include
Not a fan of doing Unix Epoch math in your head?
precision rfc3339
Storage Engine - What’s a TSM? How does that differ from binary tree?
Sorry about the names, they came up with them, I didn’t.
The more you play with Influx, the more it makes sense.

12. Telegraf Demo

13. Quick terms/recap:
Chooch was running Telegraf locally to push Windows metrics to Influx
Halladay was running Telegraf locally to push Windows metrics + SSAS
Chooch was also configured to run the SQL Server plugin to pull SQL Server metrics
The database was created on the fly
The measurements were created on the fly
typeperf –q | more dumps all perf counters to the screen
typeperf –q > yo.txt dumps all perf counters to a text file, yo.txt
Their list of inputs and outputs increases so fast, chances are, it’s there

14. Grafana Demo

15. Alerting > Notification Channels
Quick terms/recap:
In the \conf folder
copy sample.ini to custom.ini
make some quick changes, like port
Grab a Slack, it’s free!
Alerting > Notification Channels

16. More Info

17. Telegraf does more than just SQL Server, LOTS
-I showed you SSAS, and show some AD, DNS, IIS, .NET/www counters
DBATools.io (free!)
CentOS 7 (free!)
SQL Server 2017 Developer Edition (free!)
Grafana Dashboards (free!)

18. Thank you!
Thanks. As always, feel free to meet me afterwards, or drop me a line. I’m even better when not trying to rush through a day’s worth of material in 60 minutes.