How to use Elasticsearch and Grafana in a local environment

⚙️ Prerequisites:

• Docker installed and configured (I'm using wsl and ubuntu)
• Api using Elasticsearch for logging (I'm using Node.js)

---

Create a shared newtwork using Docker

docker network create monitoring

Start the Elasticsearch container

docker run -d --name=elasticsearch --network=monitoring -p 9200:9200 \
  -e "discovery.type=single-node" \
  -e "xpack.security.enabled=false" \
  docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:8.12.0

Check if Elasticsearch is running

curl -X GET "http://localhost:9200"

Start the Grafana container

docker run -d --name=grafana --network=monitoring -p 3003:3000 grafana/grafana

Access Grafana using http:localhost:3003. The default user is "admin" and password is "admin" as well.

Check if Grafana can connect to Elasticsearch by following these steps:

docker exec -it grafana sh

curl -X GET "http://elasticsearch:9200"

If the DNS was not resolved, check the shared network again or try using Elasticsearch's IP instead of the DNS.

Now, you can configure Elasticsearch in Grafana using the interface (http:localhost:3003).

Go to: Configuration -> Data Sources -> Add data source -> Elasticsearch

Fill in the information:

• URL Connection: http://elasticsearch:9200 or http://ip-addess:9200
• Elasticsearch details according to your API configuration. ⚠️Remember that you should run your API first to generate logs and to register an index.

✅ Ok! to view your logs, go to 'Explore' in Grafana.

❌ If problems happen, you can investigate:

You can check the available indexes in Elasticsearch using:

curl -X GET "http://localhost:9200/_cat/indices?v"

To see your specific index configuration (replace with your API's index name):

curl -X GET "http://localhost:9200/<api-index-name>/_mapping?pretty"

To see if logs are beeing registered in Elasticsearch:

http://localhost:9200/_all/_search?pretty