Monitoring the Asus RT-AC68U with the Telegraf agent Grafana and Influxdb Part II

If this article seems familiar, it’s because I wrote about this at the end of 2020 here. Shortly after I suffered through the pain of compiling Telegraf on my ASUS RT-AC68U I entered this request to add Telegraf to Entware. To my surprise, it was added, days later. I was relieved to see this and grateful that I didn’t have to recompile for new versions.

After I published my previous article I realized that I didn’t document how to get get the agent running and the base configuration. I also didn’t share any dashboards that chart the data. This article will document how to install Telegraf from Entware and configure it to run on boot. I’ll also share a sample dashboard.

Prerequisites

This process assumes you are running Merlin and are familiar with running a custom image. Once you’ve installed Merlin. You must enable ssh and configure Entware. This is well documented on the Merlin Github site and amtm makes this much simpler. Entware setup requires an external USB drive. This drive will contain all the binaries that Entware installs. Additionally, this drive will contain the configuration and start scripts for Telegraf. Finally, you must configure and install Influxdb and Grafana. I’ve written on this in the past more recently with Docker on QNAP…