How to Install Grafana 4 and Integrate Zabbix for Real‑Time Monitoring

Installing Grafana 4 and preparing the environment

Grafana 4 can be installed on a RHEL/CentOS system using the official RPM package. Two equivalent methods are supported:

wget https://grafanarel.s3.amazonaws.com/builds/grafana-4.1.2-1486989747.x86_64.rpm
rpm -Uvh grafana-4.1.2-1486989747.x86_64.rpm

or

yum install https://grafanarel.s3.amazonaws.com/builds/grafana-4.1.2-1486989747.x86_64.rpm

Install the additional packages required for Grafana’s web UI and font rendering:

yum install initscripts fontconfig freetype* urw-fonts -y

Start the Grafana service and enable it to start on boot:

service grafana-server start
chkconfig grafana-server on

Verify the installed package (optional): rpm -qc grafana Grafana listens on port 3000. Open a browser and navigate to http://<em>ServerIP</em>:3000. The default login credentials are admin/admin.

Integrating Zabbix via Grafana plugins

Grafana’s plugin manager (the grafana-cli tool) is used to install the Zabbix app and optional panels.

# List remote plugins (optional)
grafana-cli plugins list-remote

# Install the Zabbix application plugin
grafana-cli plugins install alexanderzobnin-zabbix-app

# Install a clock panel (optional)
grafana-cli plugins install grafana-clock-panel

# Restart Grafana to load the new plugins
service grafana-server restart

After the restart, enable the Zabbix plugin from the Grafana UI (Configuration → Plugins) and add a new data source of type Zabbix with the appropriate Zabbix server URL and credentials.

Creating a Zabbix‑backed dashboard in Grafana

1. Define a dashboard – From the Home page click New dashboard and give it a name, e.g. zabbix_server_monitor .

2. Add rows and panels – Click ADD ROW , then Add panel → Graph . Use the panel title menu to rename the panel.

3. Configure a monitoring item (example: Memory Usage)

General tab : set Name to “Memory Usage”.

Metrics tab : select the Zabbix item that provides memory usage (e.g. vm.memory.size[used] or a custom item defined in Zabbix).

Axes tab : configure X‑axis as “Time” and Y‑axis label as “Bytes” (or a suitable unit).

4. Repeat for additional metrics such as CPU load, disk I/O, network traffic, etc., following the same workflow.

5. Save the dashboard . Grafana will now display real‑time graphs of the selected Zabbix metrics.

The following images illustrate the installation, plugin installation, and dashboard configuration steps: