How to Self-Host Grafana and Access Your Dashboards from Anywhere

What Is Grafana?

Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform. You connect it to a data source Prometheus, InfluxDB, Loki, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or dozens of others and it turns raw metrics into interactive dashboards you can share with your team or keep for yourself.

It runs entirely on your own hardware. Your metrics, your infrastructure details, and your alerting rules never leave your environment. This makes self-hosted Grafana a popular choice for teams that want full observability without paying for cloud monitoring services.

Option A: Install Grafana on Linux (Ubuntu / Debian)

Installing from the official Grafana APT repository is the recommended approach for Linux servers. It registers Grafana as a systemd service that starts automatically on boot.

sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https software-properties-common wget

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings/
wget -q -O - https://apt.grafana.com/gpg.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/grafana.gpg > /dev/null

echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/grafana.gpg] https://apt.grafana.com stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y grafana

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable grafana-server
sudo systemctl start grafana-server

sudo systemctl status grafana-server

Grafana is now running on port 3000. Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser. Log in with the default credentials username admin and password admin. Grafana will ask you to change the password on first login.

Option B: Install Grafana with Docker Compose

Docker Compose is the fastest way to spin up a full monitoring stack. The example below runs Grafana and Prometheus together, with persistent volumes so your dashboards and data survive container restarts.

mkdir grafana-stack && cd grafana-stack
touch docker-compose.yml prometheus.yml

services:
  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana-enterprise
    container_name: grafana
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    environment:
      - GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD=changeme
    volumes:
      - grafana_data:/var/lib/grafana

  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:latest
    container_name: prometheus
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
      - prometheus_data:/prometheus

volumes:
  grafana_data:
  prometheus_data:

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: "prometheus"
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["localhost:9090"]

docker compose up -d
docker compose ps

Grafana is now available at http://localhost:3000. Log in with username admin and the password you set in the Compose file.

Add Prometheus as a Data Source

Once Grafana is running, connect it to Prometheus so you can start building dashboards.

Access Grafana Remotely with Localtonet

Grafana listens on port 3000 by default, but only on your local machine or network. To reach your dashboards from your phone, a remote office, or another country, you need a way to route traffic to that port from the public internet without opening your firewall or having a public IP.

Localtonet creates an encrypted HTTP tunnel that gives your Grafana instance a public HTTPS URL. The Grafana server itself requires no changes.

localtonet --authtoken <YOUR_TOKEN>

Your Grafana dashboards are now reachable at the HTTPS URL shown in the dashboard from your phone, a remote team member's browser, or anywhere with an internet connection.

sudo localtonet --install-service --authtoken <YOUR_TOKEN>
sudo localtonet --start-service --authtoken <YOUR_TOKEN>

For the Docker Compose setup, both Grafana and Prometheus already have restart: unless-stopped, so they start automatically with Docker on every boot. Run Localtonet in service mode on the host machine as shown above.

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