Grafana Cloud Linux host Quickstart

In this quickstart, you’ll create a Grafana Cloud account and set up monitoring using an integration.

Note: The walkthrough can currently only help you configure monitoring on Linux-based hosts and does not yet support MacOS or Windows.

Step 1. Sign up for Grafana Cloud Standard

To begin, sign up for a 30-day free trial of Grafana Cloud Standard. Grafana Cloud Standard gives you access to a fully hosted observability platform, complete with metrics, logs, and a managed Grafana service. With the 30-day free trial, you’ll get access to the complete feature set and unlimited dashboards for up to 10 users.

To start your free trial, sign up for Grafana Cloud Standard or follow these instructions:

1. Navigate to https://grafana.com/products/cloud/
2. Click Start your free trial on the banner.
3. Follow the instructions to finish setting up your account and access the Cloud Portal.

At any point during your free-trial, you’ll have the option to enter your billing information to continue using Grafana Cloud, uninterrupted, while keeping access to all of your data. If you choose to not provide billing information, then your account will be suspended for 7 days, after which time your account will be removed.

Step 2. Ship metrics and configure Grafana dashboards using one or more integrations

After signing up for Grafana Cloud Standard, you’ll be redirected to the overview page of the Cloud Portal. From here:

1. Click the Log In button on the Grafana card for your newly created stack
2. After successfully logging into Grafana, a walkthrough will list several available integrations such as Linux, MySQL, and JVM. Click Yes, Please! to start the walkthrough and it will guide you through installing the Grafana Cloud Agent on your system, configuring your selected integrations on the host side, and setting up your first dashboards.
3. When complete, you will be redirected to a list of your dashboards. From there, you can select the one that was just created.

If at any point you exit the walkthrough, you can always navigate back to it by clicking the Integrations icon (lightning bolt) on the menu bar. We strongly recommend that you follow the walkthrough if you are not experienced with Grafana and Prometheus.

Example: Installing and configuring Linux host monitoring using the agent and an Integration

Note: The installation process for Integrations is changing rapidly and what you see may differ slightly from what is shown here.

When you enter the walkthrough and click Yes, Please you are presented with a list of available Integrations. To follow our example, select Linux Server then scroll down to the bottom of the list and click Next step.

You will be presented with a set of instructions for installing the agent on the Linux host you intend to monitor. Follow them.

When you are done installing the agent and it is running, click Check Connection to confirm the agent is sending metrics that Grafana Cloud is receiving.

If metrics are being received, you will receive an notice. Click Finish setup.

After this, you will be shown a notification that your dashboards are ready accompanied by information about how to view them and create Alerts. Click Close wizard to be taken directly to the Manage Dashboards page where you will find a list of all of the preconfigured dashboards. The Linux server dashboard is called Nodes and can be found in the Linux Node folder. Click it to open the dashboard.

Congratulations!