Category: Information Technology

Do you wan to customize TrueNAS dashboard? Do you want to setup your own TrueNAS dashboard on Samsung tablet? In this video I’ll walk you through the process how to create your own customized TrueNAS dashboard using Grafana 7.0 and InfluxDb time series database. You can also view the step-by-step instructions how-to video on my YouTube channel.

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 website 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 privilege. 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

View post on imgur.com

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.temperature
.
.

> SELECT * FROM "da1.temperature"
name: da1.temperature
time                host          resource value
----                ----          -------- -----
1598032699000000000 truenas_local disktemp 38
1598032999000000000 truenas_local disktemp 38
1598033299000000000 truenas_local disktemp 38

Now you can access Grafana with default username and password admin/admin and customize your own TrueNAS dashboard.

Future improving:

I am still learning thru the process how to pull time series data from TrueNAS and display it with Grafana. A lot to learn. Hope this post helps you to create your own meaningful TrueNAS dashboard. If you have questions please post it on my YouTube video comment section.