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3. SSH Tunneling

SSH Tunneling

Grafana runs an HTTP server on your local node so basically, we shouldn’t access it directly from the outside.

SSH tunneling is considered to be a safe way to make traffic transit from your node to your local computer (or even phone). The principle is to make the SSH client listen to a specific port on your local machine, encrypt traffic through SSH protocol, and forward it to the target port on your node.

Of course, you could also configure Grafana to run an HTTPS server but we do not want to expose another open port. Since our data will be encrypted with SSH, we do not need HTTPS.

Once we have finished installing Grafana on our node, we will access it through this address on our local machine: http://localhost:2022

As PuTTy is a very popular client usable on many OS and used in this guide, here is where you can configure local port forwarding. If you want to use OpenSSL please follow this guide.

Inside the SSH | Tunnel’s menu, just add the local port and destination then click Add.

  • 2022 is the local port we arbitrary chose (please use a different unused local port inside the range 1024–49151)
  • 3000 is Grafana’s port
tip

Don’t forget to save the session.