Grafana is a popular open-source platform for monitoring, visualization, and observability. It allows you to build dashboards from metrics, logs, and other data sources such as Prometheus, InfluxDB, MySQL, and many more.
Grafana runs as a single service, does not require a separate runtime stack, and is well suited for VPS environments.
This tutorial was tested on Ubuntu 22.04 / 24.04.
0. Prerequisites
SSH access to your VPS
Root or sudo privileges
Internet access
1. Installing Grafana
1.1 Update your system
Update the system packages:
apt update && apt upgrade -y
1.2 Install required dependencies
Grafana requires a few common packages for repository management:
apt install -y apt-transport-https software-properties-common wget
1.3 Add the Grafana APT repository
Import the Grafana GPG key. On Ubuntu 24.04 run this command (skip to the next command, if you on Ubuntu 22.04):
wget -q -O - https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/grafana.gpg
On Ubuntu 22.04 run this:
mkdir -p /usr/share/keyrings
wget -q -O - https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/grafana.gpg
Also, on Ubuntu 22.04 you should create repo file (skip on Ubuntu 24.04):
nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list
Then paste this content (skip on Ubuntu 24.04):
deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/grafana.gpg] https://packages.grafana.com/oss/deb stable main
Save changes and exit.
Add the Grafana repository:
add-apt-repository "deb https://packages.grafana.com/oss/deb stable main"
Update package lists again:
apt update
1.4 Install Grafana
Install Grafana using APT:
apt install grafana -y
2. Managing the Grafana service
2.1 Start Grafana
You can start Grafana service by running this command:
systemctl start grafana-server
2.2 Enable Grafana on boot
To enable Grafana to start automatically at every boot, run the following command:
systemctl enable grafana-server
2.3 Check service status
To check Grafana status, use this command:
systemctl status grafana-server
You should see the service marked as active (running).
3. Firewall considerations (optional)
If you are using a firewall other than the default iptables configuration, make sure port 3000 is allowed.
Example using UFW:
ufw allow 3000/tcp
If you plan to expose Grafana publicly, consider:
Using a reverse proxy (NGINX)
Enabling HTTPS
Restricting access by IP or authentication
4. Accessing Grafana
By default, Grafana listens on port 3000.
Open your browser and go to:
http://your_server_ip:3000
Default login credentials
Username: admin
Password: admin
Enter your default login credentials:
On first login, Grafana will ask you to set a new password. Enter new password, confirm and click "Submit":
After that, you’ll be taken to the Grafana dashboard:
5. Basic usage
After logging in, you can:
Add a data source (Connections ---> Add new connection)
Create dashboards
Import community dashboards using dashboard IDs
Monitor system metrics, applications, or services
Grafana stores its configuration and data locally by default and does not require an external database for basic usage.