Looking for the Perfect Dashboard: InfluxDB, Telegraf and Grafana - Part XVII - Showing Dashboards on Two Monitors Using Raspberry Pi 4

Greetings friends, I have been telling you throughout the series on Grafana many things, from how to monitor Linux, Windows, Veeam, VMware, and also the Server temperature using IPMI.

Today I thought it convenient to show you the step by step to be able to visualize our Dashboards, if we have followed all the series will be already about 16 Dashboards, in a dynamic way and in two monitors using a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B.

Once you have finished the tutorial step by step, you will be able to have something similar to this in your Homelabs, offices:

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B – The ultimate multi-purpose device

Just a few weeks ago the new Raspberry Pi 4 Model B was released, and as soon as I saw it I knew I had found my better half to monitor, in my case I’m only using it to open a Chromium and show the graphs on two monitors, but with the 4GB model we could perfectly deploy InfluxDB, Telegraf and Grafana and use it as a server.

Technical specifications Raspberry Pi 4 Model B

SoC: Broadcom BCM2711B0 quad-core A72 (ARMv8-A) 64-bit @ 1.5GHz
GPU: Broadcom VideoCore VI
Red: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz 802.11b/g/n/ac wireless LAN
RAM: 1GB, 2GB, o 4GB LPDDR4 SDRAM
Bluetooth: Bluetooth 5.0, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
GPIO: 40-pin GPIO header, populated
Storage: microSD
Ports: 2 × micro-HDMI 2.0, 3.5 mm analogue audio-video jack, 2 × USB 2.0, 2 × USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, Camera Serial Interface (CSI), Display Serial Interface (DSI)
Dimensions: 88 mm × 58 mm × 19.5 mm, 46 g

Total price of Raspberry Pi 4 bundle

In my case I have acquired a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B of 4GB, in addition to storage, housing and so on, I leave the complete list with the price of each component to have everything ready:

This makes a total of £89.15 which in Euros is something like 99.10 Euros. In case you decide to buy this case, which I recommend because it is outdoors and allows you to dissipate the incredible heat this new version produces, I leave you the step by step of how to mount the case:

HP 22w 21.5 inches LED Monitors for the visualization in kiosk mode

I have chosen these monitors because of their good number of positive reviews, relatively low power consumption, low weight and also know that I have the HP guarantee.Also to be able to put this monitor on my desk, or on yours, or on the wall, I opted for a hydraulic arm that would allow me to turn the monitor easily, and position them as I wanted, I opted for the model Bestand Monitor Arm Mount-Upgraded Version that looks like this:

Total price of the bundle of two HP monitors and two hydraulic arms for monitor

In my case I have purchased both products in Amazon.co.uk, I leave you the detailed list:

This makes a total of £299.96 which in Euros is something like 333.38 Euros.

Configuration of Raspberry Pi 4 Model B as terminal showing Dashboards Grafana

Once we insert the microSD card into our Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, and connect the microHDMI and the power supply will start for the first time the terminal. As it contains the NOOBS distribution, it will boot with Raspbian, a Debian version specially created for Raspberry Pi, as it has 4GB of RAM, and the new processor, we will be able to see the start menu very quickly:The first thing we’ll have to do is connect the RPi to a Wi-Fi, or if we had a network cable with DHCP, better.

Once we have network connection, the next step is to update the system, for it we will follow these steps, we will make a sudo apt update

sudo apt update
Hit:1 http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian buster InRelease
Get:2 http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian buster InRelease [15.0 kB]
E: Repository 'http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian buster InRelease' changed its 'Suite' value from 'testing' to 'stable'
N: This must be accepted explicitly before updates for this repository can be applied. See apt-secure(8) manpage for details.

It will ask us that if we want to change the repository and continue, we will type Y:

Do you want to accept these changes and continue updating from this repository? [y/N] y

This will cause the repositories to be updated with the new routes:

Get:3 http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian buster/main armhf Packages [13.0 MB]
Get:4 http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian buster/contrib armhf Packages [58.7 kB]
Fetched 13.1 MB in 13s (978 kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
129 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.

Once we are ready, we can make the typical apt-get update and upgrade, so we will ask to restart at the end:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Once we restart, we can launch the RPi configuration menu, to configure the SSH server and the VNC server:

sudo raspi-config

Select Interfacing options from the main menu:And now we can enable the SSH and VNC server to remotely manage the RPi, recommended:

If we want to rotate the screens so that you can show them vertically, as I showed you in the image at the beginning of the post, we’ll have to go to Preferences – Screen Configuration:And we will have to select if we want it to turn right or left, it depends on how we have turned the monitors:With this we will only have to open Chromium and go to our interface of Grafana, and select the Dashboards that we like the most, show them as we like also, in full screen, multiple Dashboards in the same screen, rotating, etc. The result has to be something similar to this:

I hope you like it, and I would like to leave you the complete series here, so you can start playing with the plugins that I have been telling you about all these years: