How to Install Grafana on Debian VPS and Connect to Node Exporter

Here’s a detailed step-by-step guide to install Grafana on a Debian VPS and connect to Node Exporter via Prometheus.

What is Grafana?

Grafana is a powerful open-source analytics and visualization platform used to display time-series data from monitoring systems like Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and many others.

📊 What Grafana Does

Grafana lets you:

• Visualize data through dashboards with charts, graphs, and tables
• Correlate metrics from multiple sources in one interface
• Set up alerts to notify you when thresholds are breached
• Share dashboards with teams or embed them in external platforms

✅ Key Features

• Custom Dashboards: Drag-and-drop interface with support for variables, templating, and dynamic panels
• Multi-source support: Works with Prometheus, Graphite, Loki, MySQL, PostgreSQL, AWS CloudWatch, and more
• Alerting system: Integrated alerting via email, Slack, webhooks, etc.
• User management: Role-based access controls and authentication options
• Plugins and extensions: Expand functionality with community or custom plugins

🧰 Common Use Cases

• Infrastructure monitoring (servers, containers, networks)
• Application performance monitoring
• IoT data dashboards
• Business analytics (sales, web traffic, KPIs)

Grafana is often used in combination with Prometheus + Node Exporter to form a complete observability stack.

✅ Prerequisites

• Debian 10, Debian 11, or Debian 12 VPS
• Prometheus already installed and scraping Node Exporter
• sudo/root access

📊 How to Install Grafana on Debian VPS and Connect to Node Exporter

To install Grafana on a Debian VPS and connect to Node Exporter, follow the steps below:

1. 🧱 Install Grafana on Debian

   Grafana provides an official APT repository.

   1. Add Grafana APT repo

      sudo apt update
      sudo apt install -y apt-transport-https software-properties-common
      wget -q -O - https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/grafana.gpg
      echo "deb https://packages.grafana.com/oss/deb stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list
      

   2. Install Grafana

      sudo apt update
      sudo apt install grafana -y
      

2. 🚀 Start and Enable Grafana

   sudo systemctl daemon-reexec
   sudo systemctl daemon-reload
   sudo systemctl start grafana-server
   sudo systemctl enable grafana-server
   

3. 🌐 Access the Grafana Web UI

   By default, Grafana runs on port 3000.

   Open in browser:

   http://:3000
   

   Default login:

   • Username: admin
   • Password: admin

   You’ll be prompted to set a new password on first login.

4. 📡 Add Prometheus as a Data Source

   1. Go to Gear icon (⚙️) → Data Sources
   2. Click “Add data source”
   3. Choose Prometheus
   4. Set URL to:

      http://localhost:9090
      

      (Replace if Prometheus is remote)

   5. Click Save & Test

5. 📈 Import Node Exporter Dashboard

   Grafana has community-built dashboards.

   1. Click “+” → Import
   2. Enter Dashboard ID: 1860
   3. Click Load
   4. Select Prometheus as the data source
   5. Click Import

   This imports the Node Exporter Full dashboard.

Conclusion

You now know how to install Grafana on Debian VPS and connect to Node Exporter.