Deploying a Telegraf + InfluxDB + Grafana Monitoring Platform

Recently I investigated big‑data monitoring solutions and decided to build a platform based on the open‑source TICK stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf, Kapacitor) together with Grafana. The article first introduces the TICK stack and then details the installation and configuration of each component.

1. InfluxDB

InfluxDB is a popular time‑series database for IoT and DevOps monitoring. It is written in Go and has no third‑party dependencies.

Installation steps:

# wget https://dl.influxdata.com/influxdb/releases/influxdb-1.7.7.x86_64.rpm
# yum install -y influxdb-1.7.7.x86_64.rpm

Start the service:

# systemctl start influxdb

Create a database and users:

# influx
> create database telegraf
> create user "admin" with password 'admin' with all privileges
> create user "telegraf" with password 'telegraf'
> show users;

View the configuration file:

# more /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf

2. Telegraf

Telegraf is a lightweight, plugin‑driven collector for system and service metrics. It can output data to InfluxDB and many other back‑ends.

Installation:

# wget https://dl.influxdata.com/telegraf/releases/telegraf-1.11.2-1.x86_64.rpm
# yum install -y telegraf-1.11.2-1.x86_64.rpm

Configure the output to InfluxDB (excerpt of /etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf ):

[[outputs.influxdb]]
  urls = ["http://127.0.0.1:8086"]
  database = "telegraf"
  username = "telegraf"
  password = "telegraf"
  skip_database_creation = false
  timeout = "5s"

Start Telegraf:

# systemctl start telegraf

3. Grafana

Grafana provides a modern web UI for visualizing time‑series data from many sources, including InfluxDB.

Installation:

# wget https://dl.grafana.com/oss/release/grafana-6.2.5-1.x86_64.rpm
# yum install -y grafana-6.2.5-1.x86_64.rpm

Start the server:

# systemctl start grafana-server

Grafana runs on port 3000 with default credentials admin/admin. After logging in, add InfluxDB as a data source, create a dashboard, and the collected metrics appear automatically.

Finally, the article notes that InfluxDB’s built‑in web UI was removed after version 1.2, so external tools or older versions are needed for web access.

By following these steps, the reader can set up a functional monitoring stack that captures CPU, memory, network, disk, and disk‑I/O metrics for a big‑data platform.