Install Grafana 6.2.x on Ubuntu 18.04/Debian 9

May 27, 2019

4486

Last updated on June 19th, 2019 at 12:17 pm

In this guide, we are going to learn how to install Grafana 6.2.x on Ubuntu 18.04/Debian 9 servers. Grafana 6.2 has been released with a whole lot of improvements including;

Official support for Elasticsearch 7

Improved security with datasources now storing passwords and basic auth passwords in secureJsonData that is encrypted by default.
Ships with a new Bar Gauge panel which uses both horizontal and vertical space much better and can be more efficiently stacked both vertically and horizontally.
Lazy loading of panels out of view. This means Grafana will not issue any data queries for panels that are not visible. This will greatly reduce the load on your data source backends when loading dashboards with many panels.

Allows panel content (visualizations) to use the full panel height in case there is no panel title.
Improved table data support

For more details and features and bug fixes, please read the full CHANGELOG.md.

Install Grafana 6.2.x on Ubuntu 18.04/Debian 9

Grafana can be installed using the DEB binary or directly from the APT repository. Before that, ensure that your system packages are up-to-date.

apt update
apt upgrade

Installing Grafana using DEB Package

Download the DEB from Grafana downloads page or simply execute the command below to download Grafana v6.2.1

wget https://dl.grafana.com/oss/release/grafana_6.2.1_amd64.deb

Once the download is done, verify the integrity of the downloaded package by calculating its checksum and comparing it to the one provided on the downloads page, SHA256: 1c9bdaf67c4e82a61552fba3d4cf76c139a90ca3aa640ada09867f20306ea7ea

sha256sum grafana_6.2.1_amd64.deb 
1c9bdaf67c4e82a61552fba3d4cf76c139a90ca3aa640ada09867f20306ea7ea  grafana_6.2.1_amd64.deb

If all is well, proceed to install Grafana v6.2.1 on Ubuntu 18.04/Debian 9 as shown below;

sudo apt install ./grafana_6.2.1_amd64.deb

Installing Grafana from APT Repository

To install Grafana from APT repository, you need to first install Grafana APT repo GPG signing key.

sudo apt install curl
curl https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -

Next, install the Grafana APT repository by running the command below;

sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository "deb https://packages.grafana.com/oss/deb stable main"

After that, re-synchronize your system packages to the latest versions and install Grafana.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install grafana

Verify the installed version of Grafana.

apt-cache policy grafana
grafana:
   Installed: 6.2.1
   Candidate: 6.2.1
   Version table:
  *** 6.2.1 500
         500 https://packages.grafana.com/oss/deb stable/main amd64 Packages
         100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
...

Running Grafana

Once the installation is done, reload systemd unit configuration files and start and enable Grafana to run on system boot.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable grafana-server
sudo systemctl start grafana-server

Access Grafana UI

To access Grafana UI, navigate to the browser and enter the address, http://localhost:3000. To access Grafana from an externally, use the address, http://grafana-server-IP:3000. However, for external access, you need to open TCP port 3000 on UFW if it is running.