Grafana Docker + Kubernetes

Grafana is perhaps the most popular, powerful visualization software available. It can be used to monitor a Kubernetes cluster, home-assistant, and just about anything else. Using Grafana+Docker can be tricky, though.

This is one of several posts on containerization of common, useful software.

Docker Considerations

There is an excellent Grafana helm chart in the stable repo already, making it exceptionally easy to deploy on Kubernetes. All I can really add is some thoughts about dashboards and persistence…

There are several different ways to ensure that the Grafana dashboards stick around between restarts. The most straightforward is simply to add persistence.enabled: true to the values.yaml used when deploying the helm chart. If you have a persistent volume, this will prevent work from being lost (I like using the nfs-client-provisioner for home/local clusters).

However, when running Grafana in several different clusters/environments, it can be nice to pre-populate the dashboards. This can be done in values.yaml by loading directly from gnet:

dashboardProviders:
  dashboardproviders.yaml:
    apiVersion: 1
    providers:
    - name: 'gnet'
      orgId: 1
      folder: 'Grafana Labs'
      type: file
      disableDeletion: true
      updateIntervalSeconds: 15
      editable: true
      options:
        path: /var/lib/grafana/dashboards/gnet

dashboards:
  gnet:
    kubernetes-prometheus:
      gnetId: 315
      revision: 1
      datasource: Prometheus

Or by downloading json files directly:

dashboardProviders:
  dashboardproviders.yaml:
    apiVersion: 1
    providers:
    - name: 'zaneclaes'
      orgId: 1
      folder: ''
      type: file
      disableDeletion: true
      updateIntervalSeconds: 15
      editable: true
      options:
        path: /var/lib/grafana/dashboards/zaneclaes

dashboards:
  zane:
    kubernetes:
      url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zaneclaes/grafana-dashboards/master/kubernetes.json
    ingress:
      url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zaneclaes/grafana-dashboards/master/virtual-hosts.json

Accessing via IFrames

To allow embedding of Grafana within an iframe, bypassing the login so that visitors may see the charts, first the grafana.ini must be modified in values.yaml:

grafana.ini:
  security:
    allow_embedding: true
  "auth.anonymous":
    enabled: true

Caution: this will allow anyone who can access the server to see the dashboards.

However, it’s useful if you’d like to embed Grafana into a Home-Assistant panel… in which case, you may find this tutorial on Home Assistant Grafana Dashboards useful.

My Deployment Files(s)

admin:
  existingSecret: grafana-sec
  userKey: GRAFANA_USERNAME
  passwordKey: GRAFANA_PASSWORD

service:
  type: NodePort
  nodePort: 32000

datasources:
  datasources.yaml:
    apiVersion: 1
    datasources:
    - name: Prometheus
      type: prometheus
      url: http://prometheus-server
      access: proxy
      isDefault: true

plugins:
- grafana-piechart-panel

dashboardProviders:
  dashboardproviders.yaml:
    apiVersion: 1
    providers:
    - name: 'zaneclaes'
      orgId: 1
      folder: ''
      type: file
      disableDeletion: true
      updateIntervalSeconds: 15
      editable: true
      options:
        path: /var/lib/grafana/dashboards/zaneclaes
    - name: 'gnet'
      orgId: 1
      folder: 'Grafana Labs'
      type: file
      disableDeletion: true
      updateIntervalSeconds: 15
      editable: true
      options:
        path: /var/lib/grafana/dashboards/gnet

dashboards:
  gnet:
    envoy-service:
      gnetId: 7250
      datasource: Prometheus
    envoy-global:
      gnetId: 7253
      datasource: Prometheus
  zaneclaes:
    kubernetes:
      url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zaneclaes/grafana-dashboards/master/kubernetes.json
    ingress:
      url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zaneclaes/grafana-dashboards/master/virtual-hosts.json
    home-assistant:
      url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zaneclaes/grafana-dashboards/master/home-assistant.json