Nov 13 2022

Prometheus/Grafana – Pihole

Prometheus and Grafana support various integrations including Pihole, following guide will provide instructions on how to integrate these products for interactive statistics and reporting.


Step 1: Reference

The primary projects for this integration are:

Step 2: Basic Installation

In my example I use binaries, no docker or go modules to install and configure the Prometheus exporter.

# mkdir /opt/pihole_exporter/
# cd /opt/pihole_exporter/
# wget https://github.com/eko/pihole-exporter/releases/latest/download/pihole_exporter-linux-amd64
# chown root:root /opt/pihole_exporter/pihole_exporter-linux-amd64

Create a user (no password, no shell)

# adduser --shell /usr/sbin/nologin --disabled-password --home /opt/pihole_exporter pihole_exporter

Step 3: Create a systemd startup file

Create a new systemd startup file /lib/systemd/system/pihole_exporter.service with the following details:

  • In the example below I use HTTPS as a pihole protocl
  • When using HTTPS, the exporter validates SAN certificates names, so make sure it aligns.
  • In the example below I use user/password as authetnication, but a authentication API token is also supported
[Unit]
Description=pihole_exporter

[Service]
ExecStart=/opt/pihole_exporter/pihole_exporter-linux-amd64 -pihole_hostname adguard-01.mydomain.local -pihole_password xxxxxxxx -pihole_protocol https -pihole_port 443 WorkingDirectory=/opt/pihole_exporter
Restart=always
User=pihole_exporter

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Step 4: Startup comments

Make sure systemd is reloaded and process started

# systemctl daemon-reload
# systemctl start pihole_exporter
# systemctl eanble pihole_exporter

Monitor syslog for details that it properly starts-up, monitor that it actually polls information once the prometheus server is configured:

# tail -f /var/log/syslog

Step 5: Prometheus Polling

Prometheus must be configured to poll the defined pihole instances, edit its configuration file /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml and add pihole polling information:

  - job_name: pihole
    scrape_interval: 15s
    scrape_timeout: 10s
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['adguard-01:9617', 'adguard-02:9617' ]
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: ['__address__']
        separator:     ':'
        regex:         '(.*):.*'
        target_label:  'instance'
        replacement:   '${1}'

Restart prometheus:

# systemctl restart prometheus

Monitor syslog for details that it properly starts-up, monitor that it actually polls information once the prometheus server is configured by visiting your prometheus server on http://<server>:9090 and viewing polling information.

Step 6: Grafana

Make sure the pichart panel is avaiable in grafana, on the server download this panel

# grafana-cli plugins install grafana-piechart-panel

The actual dashboard is available through id: 10176 or see https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/10176-pi-hole-exporter/. I had to customize the dashboard to support multiple instances, but if you know grafana, that is 1 minute of work. Have fun.