Looking for the Perfect Dashboard: InfluxDB, Telegraf, and Grafana – Part XLVI (Monitoring NVIDIA Jetson Nano)

Greetings friends, a few years ago I showed you how to monitor the CPU temperature using telegraf for a Raspberry Pi. I have recently purchased an exciting NVIDIA Jetson Nano and I wanted to monitor it as well, this device is a bit unique. I have used the RPi dashboard as inspiration, but this is an arm board with some unique GPU capabilities, let’s take a quick look:

	Jetson Orin Nano 8GB Module
AI Performance	67 TOPS
GPU	NVIDIA Ampere architecture with 1024 NVIDIA® CUDA® cores and 32 Tensor cores
CPU	6-core Arm Cortex-A78AE v8.2 64-bit CPU 1.5MB L2 + 4MB L3
Memory	8GB 128-bit LPDDR5 102 GB/s
Storage	external via microSD slot external NVMe via M.2 KeyM
Video Encode	1080p30 supported by 1-2 CPU cores
Video Decode	1x 4K60 (H.265) 2x 4K30 (H.265) 5x 1080p60 (H.265) 11x 1080p30 (H.265)
Power	7W to 25W
PCI Express	22 lanes PCIe Gen 4 Up to 2 x8, 1 x4, 2 x1
Ethernet	1 Gbe RGMII \| 4x 10Gbe XFI
Mechanical	100mm x 87mm 699 pin connector

Then as peripherals, we can find the next:

	Reference Carrier Board
Camera	2x MIPI CSI-2 22-pin camera connectors PCIe
USB	USB Type-A connector: 4x USB 3.2 Gen2 USB Type-C connector for UFP
Networking	1xGbE connector
Display	1x DP 1.2 (+MST) connector
Other I/O	40-pin expansion header (UART, SPI, I2S, I2C, GPIO) 12-pin button header 4-pin fan header microSD slot DC power jack
Mechanical	103mm x 90.5mm x 34.77mm (Height includes feet, carrier board, module, and thermal solution)

Now that we understand the unit a bit better. It is time to start monitoring the temperature.

Grafana Dashboard for NVIDIA Jetson Nano Super

When you finish the entry you will have something similar to this. It might look a bit different in case your CPU/RAM consumption, but should work out of the box:

Dashboard – Summary

Quick Overview – On the top bar we can find a quick overview of our NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano: Uptime, Temperatures of the board, CPU/RAM/Swap usage, and processes and threats.
Resources consumption – The CPU/RAM consumption plus processes, load, etc. all in historical to detect spikes.
Network consumption – Truly important historical information with all we need regarding Network consumption and network status, like packets, drops, errors, etc.
Disk IOPS/Volume Usage – Multiple visualisations about disks and volumes, showing consumption, iops, etc.

Topology with all logical components

This entry is very similar to the previous ones, we will use telegraf to collect the information from our Jetson Nano, from there we will send them to InfluxDB, and visualize them with Grafana . The design would be something similar to this:

How-to Install Telegraf on NVIDIA Jetson Nano Super

There is nothing out of the ordinary, and we can easily follow the InfluxDB steps, but in any case, let me walk you trough the step by step to install telegraf.

curl -fsSL https://repos.influxdata.com/influxdata-archive_compat.key |    gpg --dearmor |    sudo tee  /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/influxdata-archive_compat.gpg > /dev/null
echo 'deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/influxdata-archive_compat.gpg] https://repos.influxdata.com/debian stable main' \
| sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/influxdata.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install telegraf

Once we install telegraf, I would recommend to create a few files under /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d/ one it will be called influx.conf, another called linux.conf, and last one called temperature.conf, let’s see the three files:

/etc/telegraf/telegraf.d/influx.conf

This file contains the configuration of your InfluxDB, on my case I have SSL, etc. This the output:

[outputs.influxdb_v2]
   urls = ["https://MYINFLUXSERVER.DOMAIN.COM:8086"]
   token = "YOURTOKEN"
   organization = "YOURORGNAME"
   bucket = "telegraf"

/etc/telegraf/telegraf.d/linux.conf

This file contains all that is needed for a proper Linux monitoring itself, like processes, RAM, CPU, etc.

[[inputs.cpu]]
    percpu = true
    totalcpu = true
    collect_cpu_time = false
    report_active = false
[[inputs.disk]]
    ignore_fs = ["tmpfs", "devtmpfs", "devfs"]
[[inputs.io]]
[[inputs.mem]]
[[inputs.net]]
[[inputs.system]]
[[inputs.swap]]
[[inputs.netstat]]
[[inputs.processes]]
[[inputs.kernel]]

/etc/telegraf/telegraf.d/temperature.conf

This file contains what it is required to monitor the temperature of our NVIDIA Jetson Nano Super. First of all let me explain how to see the temperatures available, by running the next command:

cat /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone*/type
cpu-thermal
gpu-thermal
cv0-thermal
cv1-thermal
cv2-thermal
soc0-thermal
soc1-thermal
soc2-thermal
tj-thermal

We can see if all are giving us values, on my case all the cvs are not getting me anything so I would not monitor them, but the rest, 100% recommended:

45281
44500
cat: /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone2/temp: Resource temporarily unavailable
cat: /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone3/temp: Resource temporarily unavailable
cat: /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone4/temp: Resource temporarily unavailable
44500
45031
44093
45281

So, all in all, this is the temperature.conf you should put:

[[inputs.file]]
  files = ["/sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp"]
  name_override = "cpu_temperature"
  data_format = "value"
  data_type = "integer"

[[inputs.file]]
  files = ["/sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone1/temp"]
  name_override = "gpu_temperature"
  data_format = "value"
  data_type = "integer"

[[inputs.file]]
  files = ["/sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone5/temp"]
  name_override = "soc0_temperature"
  data_format = "value"
  data_type = "integer"

[[inputs.file]]
  files = ["/sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone6/temp"]
  name_override = "soc1_temperature"
  data_format = "value"
  data_type = "integer"

[[inputs.file]]
  files = ["/sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone7/temp"]
  name_override = "soc2_temperature"
  data_format = "value"
  data_type = "integer"

How-to test telegraf’s configuration

Let’s quickly check if everything is working, you can try whatever .conf you prefer, but in my case I want to try the temperature one, as it is a bit more hand-made:

root@orin-nano:/home/oper# telegraf --test --config /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d/temperature.conf 
2025-01-08T09:48:11Z I! Loading config: /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d/temperature.conf
2025-01-08T09:48:11Z I! Starting Telegraf 1.33.0 brought to you by InfluxData the makers of InfluxDB
2025-01-08T09:48:11Z I! Available plugins: 236 inputs, 9 aggregators, 33 processors, 26 parsers, 63 outputs, 6 secret-stores
2025-01-08T09:48:11Z I! Loaded inputs: file (5x)
2025-01-08T09:48:11Z I! Loaded aggregators:
2025-01-08T09:48:11Z I! Loaded processors:
2025-01-08T09:48:11Z I! Loaded secretstores:
2025-01-08T09:48:11Z W! Outputs are not used in testing mode!
2025-01-08T09:48:11Z I! Tags enabled: host=orin-nano
> soc2_temperature,host=orin-nano value=41375i 1736329692000000000
> cpu_temperature,host=orin-nano value=42968i 1736329692000000000
> soc0_temperature,host=orin-nano value=41812i 1736329692000000000
> soc1_temperature,host=orin-nano value=42250i 1736329692000000000
> gpu_temperature,host=orin-nano value=41968i 1736329692000000000

It is all working!

Grafana Dashboards

I created a Dashboard using the RPI as inspiration, by selecting the best requests to the database, finishing off colors, thinking about graphics, and how to display them, and everything is automated so that it fits our environment without any problem and without having to edit anything manually. The Dashboard can be found here, once imported, you can use the top drop-down menus to select between the different variables:

https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/22650

Import Grafana Dashboards easily

I have already a wonderful Dashboard, ready just for you with everything you need to monitor our environment in a very simple way. Select the name you want and enter the ID: 22650, which is the unique ID of the Dashboard, or the URL:

https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/22650

With the menus above you can display and adjust the Dashboard to your different choices:

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: