---
title: "Grafana Integration Guide"
slug: "grafana-integration-guide"
updated: 2023-01-06T15:49:41Z
published: 2023-01-06T15:49:41Z
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.catchpoint.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Grafana Integration Guide

## Overview

This Guide covers how you can support your website performance-monitoring strategy by building a custom dashboard using Grafana's popular open data-visualization platform, [Grafana.](https://grafana.com/grafana)

## Pre-requisites

Node-RED will be used as the endpoint for the Test Data Webhook, and will parse and inject the payload into [InfluxDB](https://www.influxdata.com/time-series-platform/influxdb/), which Grafana will then query to build the dashboard. Grafana supports a number of other data sources in addition to InfluxDB.

The Node-RED portion of this implementation is simple, and to make things even easier, you can grab a skeleton flow directly from [GitHub](https://github.com/rcastley/node-red-flows/blob/master/catchpoint-influxdb.json) and import this into Node-RED.

## How to do it

Install the [InfluxDB node](https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-influxdb) in Node-RED. This is done by going to ‘manage palette,’ selecting the install tab, and searching for InfluxDB.

![](http://blog.catchpoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Node-RED-integration.png)

The imported flow creates an endpoint and an extract, transform, and load function into InfluxDB.

This will need to be updated to reflect your InfluxDB configuration. The node defaults to [http://127.0.0.1:8086](http://127.0.0.1:8086/)and a database name of ‘Catchpoint.’

![](http://blog.catchpoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Node-RED-workflow-example.png)

It is necessary that your Node-RED instance is a public endpoint so the Test Data Webhook can POST data.

InfluxDB and Grafana do not need to be publicly exposed.

A fresh installation of InfluxDB doesn’t have any databases, so you will need to create one. You’ll also need to connect to the InfluxDB instance and create a database: ![](http://blog.catchpoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Node-RED-database-creation.png)

You can now configure the Test Data Webhook to point to your new endpoint running in Node-RED, and the database will start to populate. The ETL flow in Node-RED will inject data into three new measurements, `test_counter`, `test_byte`, and `test_timing`.

The ETL function can easily be edited to suit your needs by including additional metrics beyond the ones already defined.

Log in into Grafana, and from the main menu, select **Data Sources**. Add a new data source and complete the details for your instance.

![](http://blog.catchpoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Node-RED-integration-instructions.png)

![](http://blog.catchpoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/How-to-integrate-Node-RED.png)

An example JSON schema for a dashboard is available on [GitHub](https://github.com/rcastley/node-red-flows/blob/master/grafana-dashboard.json). Copy this to your clipboard. From the **Dashboards** menu, select the sub-menu item **Import**.’ Paste the contents of your clipboard into the **Or paste JSON** text area and click **Load**.

![](http://blog.catchpoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Importing-Catchpoint-dashboard.png)

The dashboard will default to the name "Catchpoint", so just click **Import** to continue.

If you have data in InfluxDB, you will see the dashboard display data. The screenshot below is the example dashboard showing last seven days of data for a given test for all nodes.

![](http://blog.catchpoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Catchpoint-performance-chart.png)

If all is working well, you can do a direct comparison with data views from within the Catchpoint portal.

![](http://blog.catchpoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Performance-graph-in-Catchpoint-portal.png)