Installing And Setting up Grafana

Install and set-up Grafana #

You probably know what’s coming next. We Google “Grafana Helm” and hope that the community already created a Chart we can use. I’ll save you from the search by revealing that there is Grafana in Helm’s stable channel. All we have to do is inspect the values and choose which ones we’ll use.

helm inspect values stable/grafana

I won’t go through all the values we could use. I assume that, by now, you are a Helm ninja and that you can explore them yourself. Instead, we’ll use the values I already defined.

cat mon/grafana-values-bare.yml

The output is as follows.

ingress:
  enabled: true
persistence:
  enabled: true
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  size: 1Gi
resources:
  limits:
    cpu: 20m
    memory: 50Mi
  requests:
    cpu: 5m
    memory: 25Mi

There’s nothing special about those values. We enabled Ingress, we set persistence, and we defined the resources. As the name of the file indicates, it’s a very bare setup without anything fluffy.

All that’s left is to install the Chart.

GRAFANA_ADDR="grafana.$LB_IP.nip.io"

helm install grafana \
    stable/grafana \
    --namespace metrics \
    --version 4.1.3 \
    --set ingress.hosts="{$GRAFANA_ADDR}" \
    --values mon/grafana-values-bare.yml

kubectl -n metrics \
    rollout status deployment grafana

Now we can open Grafana in your favorite browser.

open "http://$GRAFANA_ADDR"

Login into Grafana #

You are presented with the login screen. Just as with many other Helm Charts, the installation comes with the admin user and the password stored as a Secret.

kubectl -n metrics \
    get secret grafana \
    -o jsonpath="{.data.admin-password}" \
    | base64 --decode; echo

Please go back to the Grafana login screen, type admin as the username, and paste the output of the previous command as the password.

Set Prometheus as a data source #

Grafana does not collect metrics. Instead, it uses other sources of data, so our first action is to set Prometheus as the data source.

Please click the Add data source icon and click the Select button inside Prometheus.

Type Prometheus as the Name. We’ll let Grafana connect to it through the Kubernetes Service prometheus-server. Since both are in the same Namespace, the URL should be set to http://prometheus-server. All that’s left is to Save & Test.

🔍 The outputs and screenshots in this chapter are taken from Docker For Desktop. There might be slight differences between what you see here and what you can observe on your screen.