Customize TrueNAS dashboard with Grafana and influxDB

Do you want to customize TrueNAS dashboard? Do you want to setup your own customized TrueNAS dashboard on any tablet? This readme is to show you how to create your own customized TrueNAS dashboard using Grafana and influxDb time series database. You can also view step-by-step instructions video on my YouTube channel which is divided into 3 parts.

Part 1: https://youtu.be/xN47J-Tp2oU (setting up logging server system)
Part 2: https://youtu.be/G7Y69_w_N-c (setting up Current Disk Temperature panel)
Part 3: https://youtu.be/2jSwrok3tSY (setting up report storage pool usage correctly with multiple datasets)

Running on

Grafana 7.1.4
Influxdb 1.8.2

Define your custom ports, local static IP address, InfluxDb username and password.

To make things easier to remember, we will decide on what port and local static IP address to use for this logging server. Depends on your network settings, yours can be different from this. If default ports numbers are used, ensure they don't conflict with other system ports you might have running. Also, if firewall is enable on the system, make sure these ports are allowed to pass through firewall.

Software        Port Number
Grafana         9800
InfluxDB        9600

Assign local static IP address. ie: 192.168.11.50 (this IP should be within the range of TrueNAS local IP address so that TrueNAS can communicate with this logging server) For influxDb username and password, please use your own imagination to create username and password here. I leave them here for reference purpose ONLY.

username: influx_admin
password: admin_Password

Grafana Installation and Configurations

Visit https://grafana.com/grafana/download to get instructions to install Grafana. But before Grafana installation, run this first to update the system

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Choose your Configuration Options

Edit Grafana configuration file located at /etc/grafana/grafana.ini to your liking. In our case

[server]
http_addr = 192.168.11.50
http_port = 9800

Install common plug-ins for grafana

$ sudo grafana-cli plugins install grafana-worldmap-panel
$ sudo grafana-cli plugins install savantly-heatmap-panel
$ sudo grafana-cli plugins install grafana-piechart-panel
$ sudo grafana-cli plugins install grafana-clock-panel

Enable service, start grafana-server, and double checking to see it's currently running.

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable grafana-server
$ sudo systemctl start grafana-server
$ sudo systemctl --type=service --state=active | grep grafana

InfluxDB Installation and Configurations

Visit this wbesite https://portal.influxdata.com/downloads/ and select InfluxDB version to install. At this point, we will determine graphite endpoint is enabled in InfluxDb setting by editing configuration file. Also, we will modify the its template for TrueNAS. Configuration file is located at /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf

[http]
# Determines whether HTTP endpoint is enabled.
	enabled = true

# The bind address used by the HTTP service.
	bind-address = "192.168.11.50:9600"

# Determines whether user authentication is enabled over HTTP/HTTPS.
	auth-enabled = true


[[graphite]]
# Determines whether the graphite endpoint is enabled.
	enabled = true
	database = "graphitedb"
	retention-policy = ""
	bind-address = ":2003"
	protocol = "tcp"
	consistency-level = "one"

templates = [
 		"*.app env.service.resource.measurement",
 		"servers.* .host.resource.measurement.field*",
	#   # Default template
	#   "server.*",
 ]

Enable service, start influxdb, and double checking to see it's currently running.

$ sudo systemctl enable influxdb.service
$ sudo systemctl start influxdb
$ sudo systemctl --type=service --state=active | grep influxdb

Visit https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.8/introduction/get-started/ for more info to create admin user and password to accept TrueNAS outputs. While there get to know how to assign user privileges. But before doing that we need to get into InfluxDB shell command line

$ influx -host 192.168.11.50 -port 9600

Once everything is setup with admin user, we now can tell TrueNAS to output time series data to influxDB

We can also run a few queries to see if the data you are looking for is being populated.

$ influx -host 192.168.11.50 -port 9600 -username "influx_admin" -password "admin_Password"
Connected to http://192.168.11.50:9600 version 1.8.2
InfluxDB shell version: 1.8.2
> SHOW DATABASES
name: databases
name
----
_internal
graphitedb
> USE graphitedb
Using database graphitedb
> SHOW MEASUREMENTS
name: measurements
name
----
.
.
da1
.
.
ps_state
queue_length
root
server
swap
tpc
uptime
vmx0
> SELECT ("temperature") FROM "da1" WHERE ("resource" = 'disktemp')
name: da1
time                temperature
----                -----------
1598644999000000000 37
1598645299000000000 37
1598645588000000000 37
1598645888000000000 37
1598646188000000000 37
1598646488000000000 37
1598646788000000000 38
1598647088000000000 38
1598647388000000000 38
1598647688000000000 38
>

Now you can access Grafana and customize your own TrueNAS dashboard. Hope this little README.md file helps you to create your own meaningful TrueNAS dashboard. If you have any questions please post it on my YouTube channel video comment section https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN47J-Tp2oU

cucac / truenas-influxdb-grafana