Getting Started with GrafCrunch

The latest version of NetCrunch comes with a fork of the open source project Grafana. One of the top open source performance visualization projects, it greatly increases the possibilities of creating live performance dashboards and allows you to present data from various sources. Read article about how to install GrafCrunch and connect it to NetCrunch Server.

In this Article we give a short introduction to the use of GrafCrunch. We will demonstrate the monitoring of free disk space and free memory.

Login

Navigate to the address you defined in the GrafCrunch installation (e.g. http://localhost:3000). Login (default settings, User: admin Password: admin).

Add a new Dashboard

Click "Home" and select "New".

Add a new Graph

Hover over the green bar and click the menu icon which appears. Choose "Add Panel" -> "Graph".

Click on "no title" -> "Edit".

Select the machine which should be monitored and the counter. In the tab "General" the name of the Graph can be changed under "Title" e.g. "C: Free Space".

To adjust the Axes select "Axes & Grid" and change e.g. "Left Y Unit" to "percent" and "Grid Max" to 100 and "Min" to 0. Also if wanted the "Legend" can be changed/disabled. In "Display Styles" the appearance can be changed. A time shift and overwrite for the time range can be added in "Time range". For more details see Grafana documentation Graph Panel.

Add a new Single stat

To add a new single stat choose "Single stat" from the menu (green bar as in add a new Graph paragraph).

Add a counter as done before.

Adjust the name of the single stat in "General" (e.g. "Free Mem"). In the tab "Options" the "Unit" (e.g. "megabytes") and "Decimals" (e.g. 1) can be changed. It is also possible to add a coloring code depending on thresholds (e.g. 0,200,300).

In this example if the free memory is lower than 300 MB the color of the value changes to orange and if it is less than 200 MB it will be displayed in red. It is furthermore possible to map a number to text in the option "Value to text mapping". E.g. the number 1 can be displayed as "On" there 0 is mapped to "Off".

For more details see Grafana documentation Single stat Panel.

Saving the new Dashboard

Enter the settings (gear icon in the top) and name the dashboard. It is also possible to add tags to each dashboard. After finishing the settings the dashboard can be saved by clicking the save icon.