Setup and installation of 'TiDB with Grafana & Prometheus: Real-Time Data & Analytics' on GCP

This section describes how to provision and connect to ‘TiDB with Grafana & Prometheus: Real-Time Data & Analytics’ VM solution on GCP.

1. Open TiDB with Grafana & Prometheus: Real-Time Data & Analytics listing on GCP Marketplace

2. Click Get Started.

It will ask you to enable the API’s if they are not enabled already for your account. Please click on enable as shown in the screenshot.

• It will take you to the agreement page. On this page, you can change the project from the project selector on top navigator bar as shown in the below screenshot.

• Accept the Terms and agreements by ticking the checkbox and clicking on the AGREE button.

• It will show you the successfully agreed popup page. Click on Deploy.

• On deployment page, give a name to your deployment.

• In Deployment Service Account section, click on Existing radio button and Choose a service account from the Select a Service Account dropdown.

• If you don't see any service account in dropdown, then change the radio button to New Account and create the new service account here.
• If after selecting New Account option, you get below permission error message then please reach out to your GCP admin to create service account by following Step by step guide to create GCP Service Account and then refresh this deployment page once the service account is created, it should be available in the dropdown.

You are missing resourcemanager.projects.setIamPolicy permission, which is needed to set the required roles on the created Service Account

• Select a zone where you want to launch the VM(such as us-east1-a)

• Optionally change the number of cores and amount of memory. ( This defaults to 1 vCPUs and 3.75 GB RAM)

• Optionally change the boot disk type and size. (This defaults to ‘Standard Persistent Disk’ and 30 GB respectively)

• Optionally change the network name and subnetwork names. Be sure that whichever network you specify has ports 22 (for ssh) and 3389 (for RDP) exposed.

• Click Deploy when you are done.

• TiDB with Grafana & Prometheus: Real-Time Data & Analytics will begin deploying.

3. A summary page displays when the compute engine is successfully deployed. Click on the Instance link to go to the instance page .

4. On the instance page, click on the “SSH” button, select “Open in browser window”.

5. This will open SSH window in a browser. Switch to centos user and navigate to centos home directory.

sudo su centos

cd /home/centos/

6. Change the password for centos user using below command. Make sure to set a strong password for centos user as the VM is hosting a DB.

sudo passwd centos

7. Now the password for centos user is set, you can connect to the VM’s desktop environment from any local windows machine using RDP or linux machine using Remmina.

8. To connect using RDP via Windows machine, first note the external IP of the VM from VM details page as highlighted below

9. Then From your local windows machine, goto “start” menu, in the search box type and select “Remote desktop connection”

10. In the “Remote Desktop connection” wizard, paste the external ip and click connect

11. This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide “centos” as the userid and the password to authenticate. Click OK

12. Now you are connected to out of box TiDB with Grafana & Prometheus: Real-Time Data & Analytics VM’s desktop environment via Windows machines.

13. To connect using RDP via Linux machine, first note the external IP of the VM from VM details page,then from your local Linux machine, goto menu, in the search box type and select “Remmina”.

    Note: If you don’t have Remmina installed on your Linux machine, first Install Remmina as per your linux distribution.

14. In the “Remmina Remote Desktop Client” wizard, select the RDP option from dropdown and paste the external ip and click enter.

15. This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide “centos” as the userid and the password set to authenticate. Click OK

16. Now you are connected to out of box TiDB with Grafana & Prometheus: Real-Time Data & Analytics VM’s desktop environment via Linux machine.

17. Once you are connected to VMs desktop environment, you can access the TiDB User interface, Grafana UI and Prometheus from the Firefox Browser available on this Desktop.

NOTE: The User Inerfaces for TiDB, Grafana and Prometheus are accessible only via Remote Desktop and not on public internet due to security purpose and not to expose the DB on public internet.

• TiDB dashboard-> http://127.0.0.1:2379/dashboard

• Grafana UI-> http://127.0.0.1:3000

• Prometheus-> http://127.0.0.1:9090

• PD client endpoints-> 127.0.0.1:2379

18. Double click on Firefox browser, by default it will open TiDB user interface as shown below. Login with root user and blank password. To set the password for TiDB UI, please follow steps 23 onwards in this guide.

19. In the Firefox browser, click on new tab and click Grafana bookmark from the bookmark toolbar. Login with below credentials.

Username: admin

Password: admin

It will ask you to enter new password on next screen. Provide the new password here and continue to dashboard.

20. You can also update the admin password from inside grafana dashboard. Click on user icon from bottom left and select Change password option.

21. Similarly open the Prometheus by clicking the Prometheus bookmark from the bookmark toolbar.

22. To access TiDB via mysql client , run below command from terminal. This will prompt to enter root mysql password, hit enter if you did not set any password or provide root password if you set the root password.

mysql --host 127.0.0.1 --port 4000 -u root -p

23. Follow below steps to change root password for tidb dashboard login from mysql client.

a. Run below command in terminal to access TiDB via mysql client. Hit enter if you did not set any password previously. Then run the ALTER command as shown below.

mysql --host 127.0.0.1 --port 4000 -u root -p

ALTER USER 'root'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'new_password';

Replace new_password with your password.

b. Flush the privileges.

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

EXIT;

c. Now reconnect to DB using below command. It will prompt for the new password and set test as the DB to use.

mysql --host 127.0.0.1 --port 4000 -u root -p -e "use test;"

d. Now use the same password when logging in to TiDB Dashboard available at http://127.0.0.1:2379/dashboard using root userid.

• Refer to official documentation for more details on How to use TiDB