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Have you ever wondered how to turn your local Grafana instance into a publicly accessible dashboard? I wonder how organisations would bind domain names to app ips. To my surprise, it turned out to be much simpler than I thought!

Initially, I assumed binding a custom domain to Grafana would involve complicated configurations and expensive domain purchases. Thanks to platforms like DuckDNS and No-IP.com, I realized you can achieve this seamlessly—even without spending a dime on domains.

For learning purposes, knowing how to map a domain to your Grafana dashboard and access it online is an invaluable skill. In this blog, I’ll walk you through the entire process: from configuring Nginx as a reverse proxy to securing the setup with SSL certificates.

Follow along if you want to unlock the full potential of Grafana by making your dashboards accessible to the world!

This blog is for intermediate individuals. I assume you already know to full fill prereqs.

Prerequisites

• AWS Account

• AWS EC2 machine

• No-IP account and No-IP Hostname

Create an AWS EC2 machine with any Linux AMI

Install Prometheus

• Connect to the created EC2 instance then install Prometheus and run it.

  1. Download using this link https://prometheus.io/download/ make sure to select the proper architecture of your VM and OS(linux). To know this run this command uname -a

      wget https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v2.53.3/prometheus-2.53.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz
     

  2. Extract the downloaded file and navigate to the extracted directory

      tar -xvf tar -xvf prometheus-2.53.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz
      cd prometheus-2.53.3.linux-amd64/
     

  3. Start Prometheus.

      ./prometheus
     

     Our prometheus the server is started and listening on port 9090

     

Install Grafana

• Again connect to your instance in a different tab then install Grafana and run it. You can install the grafana using official documents or running the binaries of it. For the demo purpose, I am running using binaries from here

    wget https://dl.grafana.com/enterprise/release/grafana-enterprise-11.4.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
    tar -zxvf grafana-enterprise-11.4.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
    cd /home/ec2-user/grafana-v11.4.0/bin
    ./grafana-server
  

  Note: Keep patience while extracting the downloaded gz file. It will take some time to complete the extraction. Also, When you run the ./grafana-server again this too takes some time.

  Now, Grafana has installed its listening on the port 3000. To check the installation, We have to add the port 3000 to the Security Group of our ec2 instance. So I am adding it and accessing my grafana server using its public IP.

  

  After, adding the port to SG, We are good to access our grafana server by the public IP and port 3000 Get the public IP from the EC2 instance and access Grafana on the browser

  

  .

  Note: When you first time access the grafana, you can put uname:admin and password:admin

  Later you can change the password if you want.

  

  Now, we have successfully installed Prometheus and Grafana. However, we are accessing our grafana using the public IP (http://3.110.151.25:3000/) of ec2 instance. But we want to access it using a custom domain name like https://grafana-demo.ddns.net

Register a domain

It’s very easy to register a domain with free DNS provider no-ip for the study purpose. Although it’s not going to give all DNS enterprise options it can give you an option to create a DNS A record.

Register yourself at https://www.noip.com/sign-up

• After signing up create a hostname in your account.

  

• Put the hostname, choose the domain and record type, and add the IP Address(put the public IP of your ec2 instance) then Create the Hostname

  

  Now, here we have bound the domain to our public IP of the EC2 machine, you can test if the domain is properly resolving to the public IP or not.

    dig grafana-demo.ddns.net
  

  

  .

Install NGINX

To access our Grafana server publicly, we need a proxy server to enable internet access. You can install a proxy server such as Nginx or Apache to achieve this. Nginx acts as a reverse proxy, forwarding client requests to the Grafana server, while also handling load balancing, SSL termination, and caching. This ensures secure and efficient access to Grafana over the internet. For the demo purpose, we ran both Promerheus and Grafana as binaries so let them run in the separate ec2 connect tabs. Open up a new tab to install NGINX

1. Install Nginx

    sudo yum install nginx
   

2. Start and Enable Nginx

    sudo systemctl start nginx
    sudo systemctl enable nginx
   

3. Create a Configuration File for Prometheus

    sudo vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/grafana.conf
   

4. Add the following configuration

    server {
        listen 80;
        server_name grafana-demo.ddns.net;
   
        location / {
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;  # Replace with the local Prometheus address
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        }
    }
   

5. Test Nginx Configuration:

    sudo nginx -t
   

6. Restart Nginx:

    sudo systemctl restart nginx
   

7. Verify Access: Open your browser and visit: http://grafana-demo.ddns.net:3000

   • 

Secure Grafana with HTTPS

To secure the grafana server using SSL, use Certbot with Let's Encrypt.

1. Install Certbot

    sudo yum install certbot python3-certbot-nginx
   

2. Obtain an SSL Certificate for our domain grafana-demo.ddns.net

    sudo certbot --nginx -d grafana-demo.ddns.net
   

   • Follow the prompts to complete the SSL setup. At this stage, you will asked to press Yes or No Press y for all.

3. Add 443 port into the SG of the EC2 machine.

4. Restart nginx sudo systemctl restart nginx

5. Verify HTTPS Access: Open your browser and visit: https://grafana-demo.ddns.net

   

   To test it properly you can create a dashboard into grafana by adding prometheus as data source.

   

Issues faced

Issue: Nginx was not getting installed.

Solution: Followed the steps from https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/98025/yum-update-shows-killed

sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo chmod 0600 /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile