Connect Promscale and Grafana

Grafana ships with built-in Prometheus, PostgreSQL, Jaeger, and other data source plugins that allow you to query and visualize data from a compatible database. To add a data source in Grafana you must be signed as a user with organization administration role privileges.

To connect Grafana with Promscale, install and run Grafana version 5.3 or later. For information about installing Grafana, see the Grafana installation documentation.

This section shows you how to connect Promscale to Prometheus, Jaeger, and PostgreSQL data sources in Grafana.

Configure Promscale as Prometheus data source

Prometheus collects and stores metrics as time-series data. To configure Promscale as Prometheus data source you need the IP address of the Promscale instance.

Configuring Promscale as Prometheus data source

1. Navigate to Configuration → Data sources. The data sources page lists previously configured data sources for the Grafana instance.
2. Click Add data source to see a list of all supported data sources.
3. Type Prometheus in the search field and click Select.
4. Configure the data source:
   • In the Name field, type Promscale-PromQL.
   • In the URL field, type http://<PROMSCALE-IP-ADDR>:9201, where <PROMSCALE-IP-ADDR> is the IP address of the Promscale instance.
   • Use the default values for all other settings.

When you have configured Promscale as a Prometheus data source in Grafana, you can create panels that are populated with data using PromQL.

Configure Promscale as Jaeger data source

Jaeger is an open source distributed tracing system used for monitoring and troubleshooting microservices-based distributed systems. To configure Promscale as Jaeger data source you need the IP address of the Promscale instance.

Configuring Promscale as Jaeger data source

1. Navigate to Configuration → Data sources. The data sources page lists previously configured data sources for the Grafana instance.
2. Click Add data source to see a list of all supported data sources.
3. Type Jaeger in the search field and click Select.
4. Configure the data source settings:
   • In the Name field, type Promscale-Jaeger.
   • In the URL field, type http://<PROMSCALE-IP-ADDR>:9201, where <PROMSCALE-IP-ADDR> is the IP address of the Promscale instance.
   • Use the default values for all other settings.

You can now filter and view traces stored in Promscale using Grafana. To visualize your traces, click the Explore button to see the traces filtering panel.

Configure Promscale as a PostgreSQL data source

PostgreSQL is an open source object-relational database system that uses and extends the SQL language. To configure Promscale as a PostgreSQL data source you need details such as host, port, database, user, and password of the underlying TimescaleDB or PostgreSQL database used by Promscale.

Configuring Promscale as a PostgreSQL data source

1. Navigate to Configuration → Data sources. The data sources page lists previously configured data sources for the Grafana instance.
2. Click Add data source to see a list of all supported data sources.
3. Type PostgreSQL in the search field and click Select.
4. Configure the data source settings:
   • In the Name field, type Promscale-SQL.
   • In the Host field, type the IP address or hostname and optional port of your TimescaleDB or PostgreSQL instance.
   • In the Database field, type the name of the PostgreSQL database. The default database is tsdb.
   • In the Userand Password fields, type the user name and the password for the database.
   • In the TLS/SSL Mode select require. This determines whether or with what priority a secure SSL TCP/IP connection is negotiated with the server.
   • In the TLS/SSL Method select file system path. This determines whether the SSL Auth details are configured as a file path or file content.
   • Use the default values for all other settings.
   • In the PostgreSQL details section, enable TimescaleDB. Grafana uses time_bucket in the $__timeGroup macro to display TimescaleDB specific aggregate functions in the query builder.

You can now create panels that use Promscale as a PostgreSQL data source, using SQL queries to feed the chart.