Building a Grafana Instance to Work with Prometheus Data

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Building a Grafana Instance to Work with Prometheus Data

Prometheus is a powerful tool for reliably collecting and serving metric data, but its built-in visualization capabilities are limited. Luckily, Prometheus can easily integrate with more robust visualization tools such as Grafana, allowing you to build robust and useful dashboards to get the most out of your data. In this lab, you will have the opportunity to build a Grafana server and configure it to access Prometheus metric data. After completing this lab, you will know how to install Grafana and integrate it with Prometheus.

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Lab Info

Level

Intermediate

Last updated

Sep 25, 2025

Duration

45m

Challenge

Install and Run Grafana

Install some required packages:

sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https software-properties-common wget

Add the GPG key for the Grafana OSS repository, then add the repository:

wget -q -O - https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -

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

Install the Grafana package:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install grafana=6.6.2

Enable and start the grafana-server service:

sudo systemctl enable grafana-server

sudo systemctl start grafana-server

Make sure the service is in the active (running) state:
```
sudo systemctl status grafana-server
```
Verify Grafana is working by accessing it in a web browser at http://<GRAFANA_SERVER_PUBLIC_IP>:3000.

Challenge

Configure a Prometheus Data Source on the Grafana Server
1. Log in to Grafana with the username admin and password admin.
2. Reset the password when prompted.
3. Click Add data source.
4. Select Prometheus.
5. For the URL, enter http://10.0.1.101:9090. Note that 10.0.1.101 is the private IP address of the Prometheus server.
6. Click Save & Test. You should see a banner that says, Data source is working.
7. Test your setup by running a query to get some Prometheus data. Click the Explore icon on the left.
8. In the PromQL Query input, enter a simple query, such as up.
9. Execute the query. You should see some data appear. If so, congratulations! This data comes from the Prometheus server.

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