How to monitor several Plesk servers with Grafana extension

Question

How to monitor several Plesk servers with Grafana extension?

Answer

I. Installing Grafana

First, deploy a new separate Grafana service where you will add your Plesk instances and monitor them (Grafana installed by Plesk is locked and cannot be edited). Use one of the following ways:

• Deploy Grafana using a Docker image in Plesk. It is needed to add the following variable to a Docker image:

  CONFIG_TEXT: GF_INSTALL_PLUGINS=grafana-simple-json-datasource

• Deploy Grafana manually using official Grafana installation guide.

II. Getting URL for the Data Source

URL for the data source has the following format:

https://hostname:8443/modules/monitoring/public/index.php/AUTH_TOKEN

To get AUTH_TOKEN, follow these steps:

1. Connect to the Plesk server via SSH.

2. Get AUTH_TOKEN:

   # sqlite3 /usr/local/psa/var/modules/monitoring/monitoring.sqlite3 "SELECT value FROM params WHERE name = 'rrd_api_auth_token'"
   
   NyuIz_uQ8oZ6SKw31eSCxNt-KAWDlQ8e6VScvyqt

3. Put AUTH_TOKEN into the URL:

   https://hostname:8443/modules/monitoring/public/index.php/NyuIz_uQ8oZ6SKw31eSCxNt-KAWDlQ8e6VScvyqt

III. Adding Data Source to Grafana

1. In your Grafana installation, go to Configuration > Data Sources and click on Add data source.

2. On the next screen, type to find "SimpleJSON". Click on it.

3. Fill in Name and URL generated on previous step.

   Note: If your Plesk UI is not secured with a valid SSL certificate, enable Skip TLS verify.

   
   
   
   

IV. Adding reports

That's it! Now you can create reports using metrics from Plesk on Grafana Dahsboards. Below is an example of how to create a report to monitor memory usage: