How to Connect Grafana & InfluxDB IOx

Madu Mitha Ravi (InfluxData) — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 07:00:00 +0000

This article was originally published on Medium.com and is reposted here with permission from the author.

Trying to connect Grafana & InfluxDB IOx? Follow this tutorial to learn how.

Assumption

InfluxDB IOx account is set with a bucket that gets populated with time series data.

It’s good to have the InfluxDB connection details handy.

Type 1: Using datasource — Flight SQL

Configs & requirements

Installation of custom Flight SQL plugins to be utilized by Grafana OSS version and unzip to the Grafana plugins path

url -L https://github.com/influxdata/grafana-flightsql-datasource/releases/download/v0.1.2/influxdata-flightsql-datasource-0.1.2.zip \
  -o influxdata-flightsql-datasource-0.1.2.zip

unzip influxdata-flightsql-datasource-0.1.2.zip -d /path-to-grafana-plugins/

Configuring Grafana by editing the defaults.ini under conf folder of your Grafana

a) Update the plugins directory to point to the plugin

b) Allow the unsigned version of the plugin to be used

c) Set the environment variables

[paths]
plugins = path-to-grafana-plugins

[plugins]
allow_loading_unsigned_plugins = influxdata-flightsql-datasource

GF_PATHS_PLUGINS=/path-to-grafana-plugins/
GF_PLUGINS_ALLOW_LOADING_UNSIGNED_PLUGINS=influxdata-flightsql-datasource

Restart Grafana to reflect these configuration changes

Grafana Flight SQL datasource setup

Launch Grafana UI http://localhost:3000/
Navigate to Configurations -> Datasources
Add Data source -> Select FlightSQL -> Name your configuration
Input the FlightSQL connection details similar to below, validate by “Save & test”

Note:

Connection details are based on your InfluxDB IOx account setup — host/url, tokenID and bucket name
SQL is the query language to access the data

Sample exploration of SQL query using Flight SQL

Navigate to Explore (Flight SQL)
Design and Run your SQL query which pulls data from your connected InfluxDB IOx using the Flight SQL

View run time using Inspector option, similarly other options can be accessed as required

Type 2: Using datasource — InfluxDB

Grafana InfluxDB datasource setup

Launch Grafana UI http://localhost:3000/
Navigate to Configurations -> Datasources
Add Data source -> Select InfluxDB -> Name your configuration
Input the InfluxDB connection details similar to below, validate by “Save & test”