InfluxDB, Telegraf and Grafana on Raspberry Pi 2

Grafana is a great data visualization application. I use it all the time for all kinds of purposes, most notably to chart information from my weather station. Recently there have been some serious changes in Telegraf that will make it play nicely with InfluxDB 0.9+

Since we're at the awesome I have recently bought a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. It's a great little machine with 4 cores and 1GB of RAM. That got me thinking: how about installing influxDB, Telegraf and Grafana on it?

Unfortunately it is not so simple. There are no official packages of the latest version for Raspbian, not to mention the 0.3.0-beta2 version of Telegraf. So to use it I have had to compile it myself. Compiling Go programs is actually quite easy with GVM and RVM but one needs to learn how to use it first. There are some resources on the Internet to help out with the process but the biggest problem of all is high CPU usage over long period of time during compilation which leads to high CPU temperatures (up to 70°C). There are 3 methods to overcome that problem

• Buy radiators (already on the way)
• Cool it down with a fan
• Find pre-compiled packages

I went with the second option which kept the CPU at a steady 34°C but let me tell you with the Go compiler compilation it took forever (5h+) on the little machine. To not have to do it again I have prepared all 3 packages so that I, and everyone else willing to try it out can grab them and skip the boring part.

influxdb_0.9.6.1_armhf.deb
telegraf_0.3.0-beta2_armhf.deb
grafana_2.6.0_armhf.deb

Now all that is left is to download those packages and to install them using dpkg -i <package-name>.

There are 2 things to note: one, there will be no telegraf database by default (need to create one yourself using the WUI - web user interface - CREATE DATABASE "telegraf") and there is no defaults file for telegraf which will make it impossible for it to start right out of the box. To fix it create one like so:

sudo touch /etc/default/telegraf

Also grafana-server service isn't enabled by default. This is mentioned at the end of the installation but for convenience here are the enchantments to make it work

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

Edit on January 11th 2016
As oriste pointed out the grafana package is a lot smaller than the one for Linux x64 found on grafana site. I have looked at it and the reason for it is that my package does not include the phantomjs binary in /usr/share/grafana/vendor/phantomjs/ folder that is used to prepare snapshots for sharing. If you'd like to use it you can always get the binary from https://github.com/piksel/phantomjs-raspberrypi/raw/master/bin/phantomjs

Edit on January 11th 2016
I have verified the packages and added some installation procedures that will help out put a monitoring solution using the three tools.

Edit on October 6th, 2016
There are ready-made packages for the armhf for Telegraf and InfluxDB now. Use those instead!. You might be puzzled as to how to download the deb packages for armhf. What you do is you take the URL of the amd64 package, change the architecture in the URL to armhf and presto - you get a link to the RPi package, for example:

https://dl.influxdata.com/telegraf/releases/telegraf_1.1.1_amd64.deb
change amd64 to armhf and you get
https://dl.influxdata.com/telegraf/releases/telegraf_1.1.1_armhf.deb

Similar with InfluxDB:

https://dl.influxdata.com/influxdb/releases/influxdb_1.1.0_amd64.deb
change amd64 to armhf and you get
https://dl.influxdata.com/influxdb/releases/influxdb_1.1.0_armhf.deb

It seems those packages are available for every build but not directly listed on the page - hence the URL magic you need to do to get them

Have fun!