Grafana is the open-source analytics and monitoring solution for every database. Grafana provides charts, graphs, and alerts, usually when it is connected to supported data sources (Graphite, Elasticsearch , OpenTSDB, Prometheus, and InfluxDB). You can also create your own dashboard for your own apps or infrastructure performance monitoring.

Here at Fixwebnode, as part of our Server Management Services, we regularly help our Customers to perform related Server Monitoring queries.

In this context, we shall look into how to install Grafana on Debian 11.

Features of Grafana includes:

1. Dashboard templating: One of the key features in Grafana, templating allows you to create dashboards that can be reused for lots of different use cases.
2. Provisioning: While it's easy to click, drag, and drop to create a single dashboard, power users in need of many dashboards will want to automate the setup with a script. You can script anything in Grafana. 
3. Annotations: This feature, which shows up as a graph marker in Grafana, is useful for correlating data in case something goes wrong.
4. The kiosk mode hides all the user interface elements that you don't need in view-only mode. Helpful hint: The Grafana Kiosk utility handles logging in, switching to kiosk mode, and opening a playlist—eliminating the pain of logging in on a TV that has no keyboard.
5. Custom plugins: Plugins allow you to extend Grafana with integrations with other tools, different visualizations, and more.
6. Alerting and alert hooks: If you're using Grafana alerting, you can have alerts sent through a number of different notifiers, including PagerDuty, SMS, email, or Slack. 
7. Permissions and teams: When organizations have one Grafana and multiple teams, they often want the ability to both keep things separate and share dashboards.
8. SQL data sources: Grafana's native support for SQL helps you turn anything—not just metrics—in an SQL database into metric data that you can graph.
9. Monitoring your monitoring: If you're serious about monitoring and you want to monitor your own monitoring, Grafana has its own Prometheus HTTP endpoint that Prometheus can scrape.
10. Authentication: Grafana supports different authentication styles, such as LDAP and OAuth, and allows you to map users to organizations. 

Steps to install Grafana on Debian 11 Bullseye

1. Perform System Update

To begin, make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade
$ sudo apt install apt-transport-https software-properties-common wget

2. Install Grafana on the system

By default, Grafana is not available on Debian 11 base repository. Now we add the Grafana repository to your Debian system using the following command below:

$ echo "deb https://packages.grafana.com/oss/deb stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list

Next, import the Grafana GPG key:

$ wget -q -O - https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key | sudoapt-key add -

After that, update the Grafana repository and install Grafana using the following command:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install grafana

3. Confirm Grafana installation

You can verify the installation of Grafana on your system by running the below command:

$ grafana-cli -v
$ grafana-server -v

4. Start Grafana

You can start Grafana server and enable it to start on boot time with the following command:

$ sudo systemctl enable grafana-server
$ sudo systemctl start grafana-server

How to access Grafana Web Interface ?

Once successfully installed, open your web browser and access the Grafana using the URL http://your-server-ip-address:3000. You will be redirected to the Grafana login page.

The default credential for login is :

User name : admin
Password  : admin

When logged in with the default credentials, you will be prompted to change the password. Do so and proceed to Grafana web interface.

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