Multiple Vector Hosts

In cloud environments, it is often desired to use the Vector data source to connect to multiple remote hosts without configuring a new data source for each host. This guide shows a setup for this use case using Grafana templates.

Setup the Vector data source

Open the Grafana configuration, go to Data Sources, and add the PCP Vector data source. Leave the URL field empty and select Access: Browser. Click the save button. A red alert will appear, with the text To use this data source, please configure the URL in the query editor.

Create a new dashboard variable

Create a new dashboard (plus icon in the left navigation - Create - Dashboard) and open the dashboard settings (wheel icon on the right, top navigation bar). Navigate to Variables and create a new variable with the following settings:

Setting	Value
Name	host
Type	Text box

Leave the other fields to their default values. Save the new variable, go back to the dashboard, enter a hostname (for example, localhost) in the text box, and press enter.

Create a new graph

Add a new graph to the dashboard, select the PCP Vector data source, enter a PCP metric name (for example disk.dev.read_bytes) in the big textbox, and enter http://$host:44322 in the URL field. If you haven’t already, select the time range to last 5 minutes and select the auto-refresh interval (top right corner) to 5 seconds, for example.

Now Grafana connects to http://localhost:44322 for this panel (if you have entered localhost in the host textbox). By changing the value of the host text box, you can change the remote host.

Setting the host by query parameter

You can also set the host by an URL query parameter. Add &var-host=example.com to the current query, or update the var-host query parameter in case it is already present in the current query string.