Using Grafana with Pulse for TM1

Pulse 6 comes with the open source version of Elasticsearch and Kibana. Elasticsearch is the search engine where Pulse stores the data and Kibana is the visualization tool powering the Pulse Explorer.

As Pulse is using the open-source version of Kibana, some features such as alerting and export to CSV are not available.

To overcome these limitations, you could use any other visualization tool supporting Elasticsearch. One visualization tool which is very popular is Grafana.

Grafana is a monitoring and observability platform, similar to Kibana. One advantage of Grafana over Kibana is that the Export to CSV feature is available in the open-source version.

This article explains how to connect Grafana to the Pulse Elasticsearch cluster.

The first step is to download Grafana here and then run the installer:

If you are not familiar with Grafana, it is highly recommended to go through the Grafana getting started guide:

• Getting started with Grafana

Once Grafana is installed, open your web browser and go to http://localhost:3000/.

To add a new data source, go to Configuration > Data Sources:

Click Add data source button:

Select Elasticsearch:

We will need to create one data source per Pulse Elasticsearch indices. More information about all indices can be found in the following article:

• Understanding the Pulse Elasticsearch data

In this example, we are going to create one database for the pulse-tm1-server-log index storing the TM1 server logs information.

Let’s update the following information:

• Name: Pulse Server Logs

• URL: http://localhost:8097

In the Elasticsearch details:

• Index Name: pulse-tm1-server-log*

• Time field name: timestamp

• Elasticsearch version: 7.0+

Finally just click the Save & test button:

We created a dashboard to help you get started, just click the button below to download the JSON file.

To import this JSON file, click the + sign and go to Import:

Click Upload JSON file:

Once your file loaded, you just need to select the datasource created previously:

Click the Import button and you should be able to see the dashboard as below:

Click on one-panel header then go to Inspect > Data and finally click the Download CSV button: