Grafana + InfluxDb based system for load test results

Table of Contents

1. Overview
2. Setting up InfluxDb
3. Writing data to InfluxDb
4. Setting up Grafana
5. Viewing data in Grafana

Overview

This guide describes how to write time-series data (e.g. load test measurements) into InfluxDb and then visualise them in Grafana.

Setting up InfluxDb

Installation instructions are well described (https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v0.9/introduction/installation/), I've used brew to do the set up on MacBook Pro/OS X El Capitan 10.11.6.

After the installation we need to start the influxd daemon which will run the database server. It can be done in 2 ways:

• via brew (this also will configure the daemon to launch during the boot process)

$ brew services start influxdb

• by running the daemon manually (this is a one-off thing)

$ influxd -config /usr/local/etc/influxdb.conf

Once the influxd daemon is launched, we can access the InfluxDB CLI via influx command.

Writing data to InfluxDb

At first, we need to create a database and define the users who should have access to it.

> create database test_db
> create user test with password 'test'
> create user grafana with password 'grafana'
> grant all on test_db to test
> grant read on test_db to grafana

We will use test user to write the data, and grafana user to access it from Grafana.

There are several ways to write data:

• insert the data through the REST API (documentation: https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v0.9/guides/writing_data/). We will use it to insert the data while running the tests.
• import a DB dump (documentation: https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v0.9/sample_data/data_download/). This method is more suitable when we need to import existing results into the system.

Setting up Grafana

TODO

Viewing data in Grafana

TODO