I love Pi-Hole and I’ve had a great time using it. Recently I’ve started the play around with Grafana and Prometheus. When I found this exporter I couldn’t resist setting it up. I also didn’t want to use docker and instead use a service in Linux. In this tutorial I am assuming you already have Grafana and Prometheus up and running locally (I have used ubuntu 20.04). There are a lot of guides around and I may do one myself at a later date.

Install pihole-explorer

  1. Open the terminal on your server and download the latest version of pihole-explorer. wget -c https://github.com/eko/pihole-exporter/releases/latest/download/pihole_exporter-linux-amd6
  2. Make a directory for pihole-explorer sudo mkdir /opt/pihole_exporter
  3. Add a user account to run the service sudo useradd -r pihole_exporter
  4. Move the files to the new directory sudo mv pihole_exporter-linux-amd64 /opt/pihole_exporter
  5. Change the group permissions to the new pihole user sudo chgrp pihole_exporter /opt/pihole_exporter
  6. sudo chgrp pihole_exporter /opt/pihole_exporter/pihole_exporter-linux-amd64
  7. chmod +x /opt/pihole_exporter/pihole_exporter-linux-amd64
  8. Create a service file for pihole-exporter sudo nano /lib/systemd/system/pihole_exporter.service
  9. Paste in the following code, replace 10.0.0.4 and xyz with your pihole IP and password.
[Unit]
Description=pihole_exporter

[Service]
ExecStart=/opt/pihole_exporter/pihole_exporter-linux-amd64 -pihole_hostname 10.0.0.4 -pihole_password xyz WorkingDirectory=/opt/pihole_exporter
Restart=always
User=pihole_exporter

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
  1. Press ctrl + x and type y then enter to save the file
  2. Reload the system daemon systemctl daemon-reload
  3. Run the service service pihole_exporter start
  4. Enable it to run at start up systemctl enable pihole_exporter
  5. Lastly check the status systemctl status pihole_exporter – press q to exit this view

Setup Prometheus and Grafana

  1. Open your Prometheus settings file. sudo nano /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml (Your path may vary depending on how you installed it)
  2. Under the heading scrape_configs: add the following code
  - job_name: 'pihole'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['localhost:9617']
  1. Press ctrl + x and type y then enter to save the file
  2. Enter the following to restart prometheus sudo systemctl restart prometheus
  3. Go to your Prometheus targets URL and check that the service is up, http://10.0.0.5:9090/classic/targets (your IP will differ)
  4. If all is working, head to Grafana and select import a dashboard.
  5. Enter the Dashboard number and press import. 10176
  6. If everything has worked, you should see the dashboard start to display data.

Links

PI-Hole Exporter dashboard for Grafana
This is a PI-Hole dashboard when using the https://github.com/eko/pihole-exporter Prometheus exporter
GitHub – eko/pihole-exporter: A Prometheus exporter for PI-Hole’s Raspberry PI ad blocker
A Prometheus exporter for PI-Hole’s Raspberry PI ad blocker – GitHub – eko/pihole-exporter: A Prometheus exporter for PI-Hole’s Raspberry PI ad blocker