Beginner, pushing data to Grafana Cloud

Grafana Cloud
1

Hi,
I’m trying to use grafana cloud to visualize some CSV log files uploaded by variuos devices to our server. The server is behind a firewall not reachable by grafana cloud, is there a way to transfer these CSV file to grafana cloud?

Can someone tell me how to do this in an easy way?
I’m not familiar with data management, database or datasources … if someone can show me a step by step example going from CSV file to grafana dashboard it would be very appreciated.

2

Hi,

There are csv plugins that reads from CSV files on the Grafana server.

As per the copy process there are several way, you can either use a cron with scp to copy files (you need to authorize the network flow in your firewall), or you can use rsync daemon to keep files ins sync across your source and Grafana server.

Hope it helps.

Good Luck

3

Hi,
thanks for your answer. I don’t have ssh access to the grafana server, I’ve only registered the free account on grafana cloud. I don’t think I have write permissions to scp to the grafana cloud.

Documentation say I should install some sort of agent … they write about Promtail or Carbon-Relay-NG but I’d need an example.

thanks again

4

did you find out the answer?

5

Hi,

I didn’t try it yet but it can be useful:

  • Grafana agent documentation here.
  • If you are familiar with Ansible tool you can take a look on Grafana playbook for agent installation and configuration (link).

BR

6

Hi,
thanks for your answer, it’s been a long time since a posted the question.
Actually I moved to the self-managed OSS version … so that I have full access to the server and I can work with CSV files. The downside is that the server is quite old and so is the grafana version I work with, but it does the job well.

Anyway I’m still curious to find out the new features so I’d like to find some time to test the agent you are suggesting.

thanks,
Loris

7

How could I copy file to grafana cloud? Can I browse the cloud based instance’s filesystem?

8

Grafana Cloud doesn’t seem to have SQL like data storage or filesystem available and I couldn’t figure out how to make use of Grafana Agent to upload CSV data.

I found this Infinity Datasource plugin (Infinity plugin for Grafana | Grafana Labs) which allows fetching CSV and other data types from external API’s. My server is behind NAT and firewall however, so I made a small token authenticated API (runs on free fly dot io plan) to which I can POST CSV files from the server using cron & curl. Then I GET them from there to Grafana Cloud using Infinity Datasource to show as tables.

More streamline option would be nice but this worked for me now.