13. 06. 2022 Giovanni Davide Saccá ITOA, NetEye, Unified Monitoring

Grafana for nTop: Realizing a Dashboard

A customer with a NetEye installation to which I had added the nTop module asked me if I could integrate nTop’s Grafana Dashboards, so they could view them by consulting NetEye’s ITOA Menu.

The installation and configuration of nTop for this client, a task I had already conducted some time ago, was a matter of analyzing what nTop performance data was available from InfluxDB. Then I would only need to extract that data to make Grafana Dashboards to propose to the client.

The first configuration I added was to export nTop time series data to InfluxDB, which involved creating the DB and nTop user on the DB Server.

The second useful configuration was to instruct nTop to save the time series data in InfluxDB by configuring all of its DB Server connection parameters.

To proceed, consult the menu Settings -> Preferences:

Note, in terms of data security, how nTop communicates with InfluxDB via the HTTPS protocol.

Now it’s time to configure Grafana and give it the details of the Data Source it should use:

It’s a requirement that the same DB connection parameters configured for nTop are also passed to Grafana.

The last step is to add an nTop Dashboard to Grafana. To do this we make use of the query builder that Grafana provides, so that we have help in constructing a query useful for extracting time series data from the database when we generate our Dashboard:

Queries change depending on whether you then want to represent the data with a Gauge or a Counter.

The gauges are meant for values such as Active Flows or Bandwidth, hence you see in the SELECT the need to use the derivative, while the counter is better suited to representing incremental values that can be taken as-is:

Always remember to check if a good JSON file can do the trick for you; Google is your friend!

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Giovanni Davide Saccá

Hi all, my name is Davide and I was born in San Donato Milanese. Since I was a boy I've always been intrigued by PCs, and so I took my first steps with my Commodore VIC-20. Before joining Würth Phoenix as an SI consultant, I worked first as a Network Engineer for several ISPs (Internet Service Providers) in the late 90s, then for the first ASP (Application Service Provider) and next as a head of IT Network and Security. My various ITIL and Vendor certifications have allowed me to be able to cooperate at multiple project levels. I like tennis, music, motorcycles and going on nature walks with my family.

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Giovanni Davide Saccá

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