Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Using Grafana

With Grafana, Private Cloud Appliance offers administrators a single, visual interface to the logs and metrics collected at all levels and across all components of the system.

This section provides basic guidelines to access Grafana and navigate through the logs and monitoring dashboards. For additional information about Grafana services and how to use Grafana, see the Oracle Systems blog Oracle PCA X9-2 Monitoring and Alerting with Grafana.

The Grafana Home Page

Select one of these options to access Grafana:

  • Service Enclave admin user.

    1. Log in to the Service Web UI.

    2. On the right side of the dashboard, click the Monitoring tile.

      The Grafana login page opens in a new browser tab. In the future, you can go directly to this Grafana login page as described in "Any Grafana user" below.

    3. Enter your user name and password at the prompts.

      You can create new users, and give the new users the direct URL to the Grafana login page. To create new Grafana users, see Managing Grafana Users. For the direct URL to the Grafana login page, see "Any Grafana user" below.

  • Any Grafana user.

    You do not need to be a Service Enclave user.

    1. Go to the Grafana login page.

      The Grafana login page is https://grafana.pca_name.your_domain/login, where pca_name is the name of the Private Cloud Appliance.

    2. Enter your user name and password at the prompts.

The Welcome panel on the Grafana home page contains many links to grafana.com for information about how to use Grafana, such as how to create your own dashboards, queries, and alerts. You can also find Grafana tutorials in the Private Cloud Appliance 3.x playlist on the Oracle Learning YouTube Channel, or search for Grafana on Oracle Blogs.

On the left side of the home page is a vertical bar with icons that open the list of dashboards or the list of alerts, for example, or provide access to system logs as described in Using Grafana Explore Queries. Your user icon near the bottom of the bar enables you to change your preferences settings or log out. The Grafana logo at the top of the bar takes you back to the Grafana home page.

The Grafana Time Line

When logs and metrics are stored in Prometheus, they are given a time stamp based on the time and time zone settings of the Private Cloud Appliance. However, Grafana displays the time based on user preferences, which might result in an offset because you are in a different time zone.

Use the following instructions if you want to synchronize the time line in the Grafana visualizations with the time zone of the appliance:

  1. Near the bottom of the vertical menu bar on the left side of the Grafana page, click your user account icon and click the Preferences option on the submenu that pops up.

  2. In the Preferences section of the page, change the Timezone setting to the same time zone as the appliance.

  3. Click the Save button at the bottom of that section to apply the change.

Monitoring Multiple Private Cloud Appliance Systems

If you need to deploy an external Grafana service with variable-driven dashboards to monitor multiple Private Cloud Appliance systems, see the following resources: