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Monitoring Stack Setup

This page describes how to install and configure the telemetry visualization stack used with CGSE: InfluxDB3 Core for storage and Grafana for visualization.

Grafana itself is not part of CGSE, but most users rely on it to inspect the telemetry data written by CGSE into InfluxDB.

For dashboard usage, see Using Grafana.

For developer details on how CGSE writes telemetry, see Monitoring and Telemetry in CGSE.

Installation

The steps below assume installation on the server that hosts the telemetry stack.

Install InfluxDB3 Core

The easiest way to install InfluxDB 3 Core for Linux or Mac is with the following command. This will install the latest release on your system.

curl -O https://www.influxdata.com/d/install_influxdb3.sh && sh install_influxdb3.sh

For a more in-depth explanation, check out the InfuxDB documentation to Install InfluxDB 3 Core.

In order to manage the database, you will need to create an admin token:

influxdb3 create token --admin

Export the returned token (that starts with apiv3_) as the environment variable INFLUXDB3_AUTH_TOKEN and reload your terminal session. Store this token securely, Grafana and other administration tasks depend on it.

Warning

Don't push your admin InfluxDB token to a (remote) repository. Too many users put it in a .env file and forget to git ignore that file. Don't make that mistake!

Install Grafana

Installing Grafana is a bit more complicated and it's best that you follow the official installation from the GrafanaLabs installation page. After installation, start the required services if they are not already running.

Basic Verification

After installation, verify core components:

  1. InfluxDB is reachable and has your target database.
  2. Grafana is reachable via http://localhost:3000 (or server host and port).
  3. You can create and test an InfluxDB data source in Grafana.

Use these commands to inspect InfluxDB:

influxdb3 show databases
influxdb3 query --database <database name> "SHOW TABLES"

If no tables are present yet, that usually means no CGSE process has written telemetry to the selected database.

Operational Notes

  • Keep the InfluxDB token secure and avoid committing it in files.
  • If Grafana is remote, ensure network access and firewall rules allow the required ports.
  • If multiple projects share the same server, use clear naming for databases and Grafana data sources.
  • Keep package versions aligned with your operating environment and update through normal change control.