Home Assistant, InfluxDB and Grafana

This how-to will take you through setting up Home Assistant (HA) to send logged data to InfluxDB and then access it in Grafana. This will give you access to longer term data logging, statisics and analytics, which allows you to see long term visualizations and trends.

This setup will have a separate instance of Grafana and InfluxDB setup outside of Home Assistant, which provides greater flexibility to the InfluxDB setup.

Prerequisites

This guide assumes you have Home Assistant setup either as a VM or on dedicated hardware and Docker setup on a separate host. If HA is on a dedicated vLAN, the docker host will need an interface connected to that vLAN.

Guide

Setup InfluxDB in Docker
1. Under sources, follow “Install InfluxDB using Docker Compose”
2. Change “DOCKER_INFLUXDB_INIT_ORG” to what you would like your organization name to be.
3. Change “DOCKER_INFLUXDB_INIT_BUCKET” to “home_assistant”
Create a bucket to store data in
This is only needed if you do not want to use the bucket automatically created in the previous step or you already have an InfluxDB instance running.
1. Log into InfluxDB
2. On the left, go to Load Data > Buckets
3. On the right, click on Create Bucket
4. Enter a name and select a retention period
  Consider retention periods carefully, as the data and database size can grow quickly, depending on setup.
Create an API token for Home Assistant with write access to the bucket
Best practices is to create a dedicated API token for each service accessing the bucket with restricted permissions
1. On the left, go to Load Data > API Tokens
2. On the right, click on ”+ Generate API Token”
3. Give the token a meaningful description (Home Assistant Access)
4. Under “Buckets” find the bucket you will store HA data in, then check off “Write”
5. Click “Generate” at the bottom
6. Copy the API token, once the box is closed, you will not be able to access it again.
Send data from HA to InfluxDB
1. Log into Home Assistant with an account that has admin permissions
2. If you do not already have it, install the Studio Code Server add-on
3. In Studio Code Server, open Config > Configuration.yaml
4. Add the InfluxDB section (example below) substituting the details for your setup
  - Host: IP of the docker host on the same vlan as HA
  - Token: This is the API token generated in the previous step
  - Organization ID: This can be found in the URL of InfluxDB, at /orgs/RANDOM_16_DIGIT_HEX_ID
  - Bucket: This is the bucket created above.
Setup Grafana in Docker
1. Under sources, follow “Run Grafana Docker image”
2. Change the image to “grafana/grafana-oss” if you do not have an enterprise license
3. Add the depends on section from the example below (optional)
Create an API token for Grafana with read access Best practices is to create a dedicated API token for each service accessing the bucket with restricted permissions
1. Go back to InfluxDB
2. On the left, go to Load Data > API Tokens
3. On the right, click on + Generate API Token > Custom API Token
4. Give the token a meaningful description (Grafana)
5. Under “Buckets” find the bucket you will want to display graph data from, then check off “Read”
  Alternatively, check off Read next to “All Buckets”
6. Click “Generate” at the bottom
7. Copy the API token, once the box is closed, you will not be able to access it again.
Add InfluxDB to Grafana
1. Log into Grafana
2. On the left, go to Connections > Add new connection
3. Filter by “InfluxDB” and click on it
4. At the top, change the query language to Flux
5. Fill in the details for your setup
  - HTTP:
    - URL: http://CONTAINER_NAME:8086
  - Auth: Uncheck all of them
  - InfluxDB Details:
    - Organization: The name of your organization (not the hex ID rom above)
    - Token: The token generated in the previous step
    - Default Bucket: Leave blank to pull all buckets, specify a bucket to read data from
6. Click “Save & Test” at the bottom to confirm your setup works.

You should now be ready to start building dashboards in Grafana with data from Home Assistant.

Config files

Docker config.yml

services:
  influxdb2:
    container_name: influxdb
    image: influxdb:2
    ports:
      - 8086:8086
    environment:
      DOCKER_INFLUXDB_INIT_MODE: setup
      DOCKER_INFLUXDB_INIT_USERNAME_FILE: /run/secrets/influxdb2-admin-username
      DOCKER_INFLUXDB_INIT_PASSWORD_FILE: /run/secrets/influxdb2-admin-password
      DOCKER_INFLUXDB_INIT_ADMIN_TOKEN_FILE: /run/secrets/influxdb2-admin-token
      DOCKER_INFLUXDB_INIT_ORG: orion_tech
      DOCKER_INFLUXDB_INIT_BUCKET: home_assistant
    secrets:
      - influxdb2-admin-username
      - influxdb2-admin-password
      - influxdb2-admin-token
    volumes:
      - type: volume
        source: influxdb2-data
        target: /var/lib/influxdb2
      - type: volume
        source: influxdb2-config
        target: /etc/influxdb2
 
  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana-oss
    container_name: grafana
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    volumes:
      - grafana-storage:/var/lib/grafana
    depends_on:
      - influxdb2
 
secrets:
  # these files are in the root account's home folder
  influxdb2-admin-username:
    file: ~/.env.influxdb2-admin-username
  influxdb2-admin-password:
    file: ~/.env.influxdb2-admin-password
  influxdb2-admin-token:
    file: ~/.env.influxdb2-admin-token
 
volumes:
  influxdb2-data:
  influxdb2-config:
  grafana-storage:

Home Assistant configuration.yaml

influxdb:
  api_version: 2
  ssl: false
  host: DOCKER_HOST_IP
  port: 8086
  token: GENERATED_AUTH_TOKEN
  organization: RANDOM_16_DIGIT_HEX_ID
  bucket: home_assistant
  tags_attributes:
    - friendly_name

Sources

Guides Software

Code Bible

Explorer