Hi,
I have created my first grafana dashboards with influxdb as data source. This is probably a super newbie question, but I would like to access my grafana dashboard from remote or somehow host them on “the internet”
My grafana dashboards are running on a raspberry pi within my home network. I can access them through http://grafana.staged-by-discourse.com
How can I make the available from the public internet or even as an alternativ host them at some hosting service?
br
Stian
if you are running your grafana on a pi, try dataplicity. At the moment, you will be able to modify stuff on it from the terminal.
Great question with many possible answers.
Personally I host my home Grafana instance on Digital Ocean, which provides virtual machines fit for running Grafana for ~$5 per month. I’m mostly using Digital Ocean instead of a Raspberry Pi because it’s slightly easier to provision a VM than it is to provision a Pi and I don’t have to smash a hole through my firewall at home (because sadly home network appliances are often not very good at security).
Another option which would be fit for home use is to use a VPN. I’m currently testing out Tailscale which is a hosted & user friendly version of WireGuard. VPN is currently a bit of a marketing buzzword, so there’s a lot of actors out there using the term for things which might not be what you’d want (VPN can both be used as a way for you to create a tunnel through which you route your internet traffic and to create a tunnel to access things not on the internet, of which you want the latter for this particular purpose).
Somewhat similar is using Tor and hidden services to access Grafana through the Tor network.
Another solution would be to dynamically forward DNS and open a port in your router directed to your Pi. I’ve used DynDNS for this back in the days.
A solution such as the afforementioned Dataplicity or ngrok is another easy way to access your Pi from the outside.
Not relevant for hobbyists, but in case someone running a small company happens to read this, I’d recommend (with the disclaimer that this is my employer) Grafana Cloud which is Grafana Labs’ hosted $49/month hosted Grafana solution (which includes support from the team behind Grafana).
https://grafana.com/products/cloud/
Security-wise: Any service which lets you access your Pi from outside your network will open up some connection to your home network. A lot of home network appliances are really bad security-wise, so you’d want to lock down your Pi as much as possible and be aware of the risks involved with opening up your network for external access. That said, these are all well-tried solutions which have been documented time and time again so it’s absolutely doable for a skilled hobbyist to set up in a sufficiently secure manner.
If your budget allows for it, I would still recommend using having a pod at Digital Ocean and send the data there from your home network. It’s easier to sleep at night when someone else takes care of your server for you and doesn’t open up for accessing your network 