Chronograf Contents

Installing Chronograf

This is archived documentation for InfluxData product versions that are no longer maintained. For newer documentation, see the latest InfluxData documentation.

This page provides the requirements for installing and configuring Chronograf. For the fastest way to get up and running with Chronograf, see the Getting Started guide.

Content

Requirements

Installation of the Chronograf package may require root or administrator privileges to complete successfully.

TICK

Chronograf is the UI for the other components of the TICK stack: Telegraf, InfluxDB/InfluxEnterprise Clustering, and Kapacitor. You do not need to install every component of the TICK stack to use Chronograf. The following sections give a brief description of the other TICK stack components, how they fit within Chronograf, and if they are necessary for your setup.

InfluxDB/InfluxEnterprise cluster (required)

InfluxDB is InfluxData’s open source time series database designed and built to manage high write and query loads. InfluxDB Enterprise is the InfluxData closed source time series database with clustering and high availability. InfluxDB instances and InfluxEnterprise clusters store the time series data that populate the Chronograf interface.

Chronograf requires at least one InfluxDB instance or one InfluxEnterprise cluster to serve as its data storage component. A single Chronograf instance can support several InfluxDB instances or InfluxEnterprise clusters.

Installation Resources:

Telegraf is the InfluxData plugin-driven server agent for collecting and reporting metrics. Telegraf collects data and writes data to the InfluxDB instance or InfluxEnterprise cluster that is connected to Chronograf. Chronograf is designed to work with Telegraf data and offers pre-created dashboards for several Telegraf input plugins.

Chronograf requires at least one Telegraf instance that collects data and writes the data to an InfluxDB instance or InfluxEnterprise cluster. Minimally, the Telegraf instance must have enabled the system statistics input plugin, which provides the system-level data necessary for the Chronograf interface.

Installation Resources:

Kapacitor (optional)

Kapacitor is the InfluxData processing framework for creating alerts, running ETL jobs, and detecting anomalies in your data. Kapacitor is responsible for creating and sending alerts in Chronograf.

Chronograf requires at least one Kapacitor instance if you plan on using Chronograf for creating, sending, and managing alerts. Kapacitor instances are scoped to the InfluxDB instance or InfluxEnterprise cluster that connects to Chronograf. An InfluxDB instance or InfluxEnterprise cluster can support more than one Kapacitor instance.

You do not need a Kapacitor instance if you plan on only using Chronograf’s host list, data explorer, dashboard, and admin pages.

Installation Resources:

Networking

Chronograf runs on localhost:8888 by default. Those settings are configurable.

Builds

The latest Chronograf builds are available on InfluxData’s Downloads page. See Chronograf’s README on GitHub for instructions on building from source.

Using TAR packages

If you choose to use the TAR packages, as opposed to the operating system package management tools (such as yum, wget, etc.), there are a couple of things that you should be aware of.

First, when you start-up Chronograf, we recommend that you specify a location for the underlying datastore as a default location is not specified. If you do NOT specify a location for the underlying datastore, a datastore named chronograf-v1.db will be created in the directory from which you start Chronograf.

Second, specifying the location of the underlying datastore is important because as you take advantage of future release of Chronograf (maintenance releases or feature bearing), you will want to refer to this underlying datastore to preserve your dashboards and datasource configuration.

If you simply un-TAR the downloaded package and restart Chronograf, you will reinitialize the local datastore – and it will appear as though all of your previous configurations and dashboards have disappeared.

The package management tools provided by the operating system deal with the version changes in the underlying software, but when using TAR, the version number is embedded in the directory structure and you end up with multiple side-by-side versions of the software.

The recommended way to address this issue when using the TAR package is to do the following:

In your home directory, create a sub-directory called .chronograf:

mkdir ~/.chronograf

When starting up Chronograf use the -b option to specify the location of this directory for the local datastore:

./chronograf-<version>/usr/bin/chronograf -b ~/.chronograf/chronograf-v1.db

The next time you un-TAR a new version of Chronograf, simply change the <version> portion of the command string and specify your existing chronograf-v1.db datastore.

Configuration and Security

See Configuring Chronograf for a description of the available configuration options. See Managing security for TLS and OAuth 2.0 setup instructions.