Setting Up Grafana Locally, Installing the Infinity Plugin, and Creating Your First Dashboard from CSV

Grafana is a powerful open-source platform for monitoring and observability. In this guide, we’ll walk you through setting up Grafana locally on your machine, installing the Infinity plugin, and creating your first dashboard.

Step 1: Setting Up Grafana Locally

1.1 Prerequisites Before we begin, ensure that you have the following:

A macOS, Linux, or Windows machine.
A terminal application (like Terminal on macOS).1.1 Prerequisites Before we begin, ensure that you have the following:
- A macOS, Linux, or Windows machine.
- A terminal application (like Terminal on macOS).

These commands are for Mac-OS. You can just go to

Grafana Doc

curl -O https://dl.grafana.com/enterprise/release/grafana-enterprise-11.1.4.darwin-amd64.tar.gz
tar -zxvf grafana-enterprise-11.1.4.darwin-amd64.tar.gz

Here we have downloaded the zip and extracted the zip file into our system.

1.4 Start the Grafana Server Navigate to the Grafana directory and start the server:

cd grafana-11.1.4/
./bin/grafana-server

Grafana will now be running locally on your machine, accessible at http://localhost:3000.

1.5 Access Grafana Open your web browser and go to http://localhost:3000. The default login credentials are:

Username: admin
Password: admin

You'll be prompted to change the default password upon your first login.

Step 2: Installing the Infinity Plugin

The Infinity plugin is a versatile Grafana data source that lets you load data from CSV files, JSON, and more. Here's how to install it:

2.1 Install the Plugin Using grafana-cli From your terminal, run the following command to install the Infinity plugin:

./bin/grafana-cli plugins install yesoreyeram-infinity-datasource

If you encounter a permission error (e.g., pluginsDir is not a writable directory), use sudo to run the command with elevated privileges:

sudo ./bin/grafana-cli plugins install yesoreyeram-infinity-datasource

2.2 Restart the Grafana Server After installing the plugin, restart the Grafana server:

./bin/grafana-server

2.3 Verify the Plugin Installation Once Grafana is running again, navigate to Configuration > Plugins in the Grafana UI. Search for "Infinity" to ensure that the plugin is installed and enabled.

However, you may also be able to install the plugin manually via the UI only. Just go to settings -> Plugins and search for it.

Grafana Installation for Infinity

Step 3: Creating Your First Dashboard with Infinity

Now that Grafana and the Infinity plugin are set up, let’s create your first dashboard using CSV data.

3.1 Prepare Your Data Let's assume you have CSV data representing weekly project estimates and deliverables.

3.2 Create a New Dashboard

In the Grafana UI, click on + in the sidebar and select Dashboard.
Click Add new panel to start configuring your first chart.

3.3 Configure the Data Source

In the panel editor, select Infinity as your data source.
Choose Type: CSV.
For Source Type, you can select Inline if you want to paste the CSV data directly or URL if you have a hosted CSV file.

3.4 Configure the Visualization

Set the column values as shown below.

X-Axis: Set the X-Axis to the Week column.
Y-Axis: Map the Estimated and Delivered columns to the Y-Axis. This will plot both series on the bar chart.

3.5 Customize the Display Adjust the chart's display options to suit your needs. You can choose to stack the bars, change colors, and more.

3.6 Save Your Dashboard Once your chart looks good, click Apply to add the panel to your dashboard. Don’t forget to save the dashboard itself!