Getting Started

Welcome to the Minimal Status Panel! This guide will walk you through installation, basic setup, and creating your first monitoring panel.

🎯 Prerequisites

Before installing the plugin, make sure you have:

📦 Installation

This is the easiest way to get started:

  1. Download the latest release
    • Go to the Releases page
    • Download the minimal-status-panel-x.x.x.zip file
  2. Extract to Grafana plugins directory 
    # For Docker installations
unzip minimal-status-panel-*.zip -d /var/lib/grafana/plugins/minimal-status-panel/

# For standalone Grafana (Linux)
sudo unzip minimal-status-panel-*.zip -d /var/lib/grafana/plugins/minimal-status-panel/

# For macOS (Homebrew)
unzip minimal-status-panel-*.zip -d /usr/local/var/lib/grafana/plugins/minimal-status-panel/
  3. Restart Grafana 
    # Docker
docker restart your-grafana-container

# Systemd (Linux)
sudo systemctl restart grafana-server

# macOS (Homebrew)
brew services restart grafana

Option 2: Build from Source

For developers or those who want the latest features:

  1. Clone and build 
    git clone https://github.com/Perseus985/Minimal-Status-Panel.git
cd minimal-status-panel
npm install
npm run build
  2. Copy to Grafana plugins directory 
    sudo cp -r dist /var/lib/grafana/plugins/minimal-status-panel
sudo chown -R grafana:grafana /var/lib/grafana/plugins/minimal-status-panel
  3. Restart Grafana

🔧 Basic Setup

Step 1: Configure Prometheus with Blackbox Exporter

First, set up monitoring for your services. Here’s a basic Prometheus configuration:

# prometheus.yml
scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'blackbox'
    metrics_path: /probe
    params:
      module: [http_2xx]  # Look for HTTP 200 response
    static_configs:
      - targets:
        - https://google.com
        - https://github.com
        - https://your-website.com
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__address__]
        target_label: __param_target
      - source_labels: [__param_target]
        target_label: instance
      - target_label: __address__
        replacement: blackbox-exporter:9115  # Blackbox exporter address

Step 2: Create Your First Panel

  1. Create or edit a Grafana dashboard

  2. Add a new panel
    • Click “Add panel” → “Add a new panel”
  3. Select the Minimal Status Panel
    • In the “Visualization” dropdown, select “Minimal Status Panel”
  4. Configure your data source
    • Select your Prometheus data source
    • Add this basic query: 
      probe_success
  5. Save your panel
    • Click “Apply” to save the panel to your dashboard

🎨 Your First Status Panel

Congratulations! You should now see a status panel showing the health of your monitored services.

What You’ll See

Quick Customization

Try these immediate customizations in the panel options (right sidebar):

🔍 Common Queries

Here are some useful Prometheus queries to get you started:

Basic Monitoring

# All services
probe_success

# Specific services only
probe_success{instance=~"https://google.com|https://github.com"}

# Filter by job
probe_success{job="blackbox"}

With Response Time

# Service status with response time context
probe_success or probe_duration_seconds

Advanced Filtering

# Production services only
probe_success{environment="production"}

# HTTP services (excluding ping)
probe_success{job="blackbox",module="http_2xx"}

⚡ Quick Tips

  1. Start Small: Begin with 3-5 services to get familiar with the interface
  2. Use Meaningful Names: Service URLs like https://api.mysite.com are more readable than IP addresses
  3. Group Related Services: Use separate panels for different environments (staging, production)
  4. Experiment with Display Modes: Grid mode works great for overview dashboards
  5. Check Query Inspector: If data isn’t showing, use Grafana’s Query Inspector to debug

🚀 Next Steps

Now that you have a basic panel running:

âť“ Troubleshooting

Plugin Not Appearing

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Services Show as “Unknown”

Need more help? Check our FAQ or create an issue on GitHub!