Installing Grafana on your Kubernetes Cluster

Since Kubernetes has now been installed, we can continue to run a demonstration! For this demonstration we are going to deploy the following:

1. Dapr as our Distributed Application Runtime
2. Deploy an Hello World Example
3. Grafana

So let's get started!

Installing Dapr

To install Dapr we can utilize its install.sh script which we execute:

wget -q https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dapr/cli/master/install/install.sh -O - | /bin/bash

Whereafter we can run dapr --version to validate that it is installed:

# Output of dapr --version
CLI version: 1.2.0
Runtime version: n/a

Finally, we configure Dapr on our Kubernetes cluster by initializing it

dapr init -k

Which we again verify by running dapr status -k

# Output of dapr status -k
NAME                   NAMESPACE    HEALTHY  STATUS   REPLICAS  VERSION  AGE  CREATED
dapr-sentry            dapr-system  True     Running  1         1.2.0    33s  2021-05-30 11:27.57
dapr-operator          dapr-system  True     Running  1         1.2.0    33s  2021-05-30 11:27.57
dapr-dashboard         dapr-system  True     Running  1         0.6.0    33s  2021-05-30 11:27.57
dapr-sidecar-injector  dapr-system  True     Running  1         1.2.0    33s  2021-05-30 11:27.57
dapr-placement-server  dapr-system  True     Running  1         1.2.0    32s  2021-05-30 11:27.58

Installing a Demo Application

kubectl create deployment kubernetes-bootcamp --image=gcr.io/google-samples/kubernetes-bootcamp:v1

Grafana Dashboard

Installing Grafana is a bit more complicated as it requires a store to gather our telemetry. For this we will be utilizing Prometheus.

Install Prometheus

For configuring Prometheus, we utilize the commands below that will set it up with a persistent volume.

💡 To disable persistent volumes, append --set alertmanager.persistentVolume.enable=false --set pushgateway.persistentVolume.enabled=false --set server.persistentVolume.enabled=false to the end of the helm install command.

# Create a dedicated namespace
kubectl create namespace dapr-monitoring

# Install Prometheus
helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update
helm install dapr-prom prometheus-community/prometheus -n dapr-monitoring

# Verify that it is running
kubectl get pods -n dapr-monitoring -w

Install Grafana

Since we have our store set-up, we can now install our dashboard

💡 We can again disable persistent volumes by appending --set persistence.enabled=false to the helm install command

# Install Grafana
helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm install grafana grafana/grafana -n dapr-monitoring

# Verify that it is running
kubectl get pods -n dapr-monitoring -w

Grafana Admin Password

Once Grafana is up and running, gather its admin password by running the command below

kubectl get secret --namespace dapr-monitoring grafana -o jsonpath="{.data.admin-password}" | base64 --decode ; echo

Access Grafana

Now Grafana is up and running, we can access it by port forwarding its port ot our local system.

# Forward Grafana from our cluster to localhost
kubectl port-forward svc/grafana 8080:80 -n dapr-monitoring

# Open browser at:
# http://localhost:8080/

We can now login with:

• Username: admin
• Password: See Grafana Admin Password (kubectl get secret --namespace dapr-monitoring grafana -o jsonpath="{.data.admin-password}" | base64 --decode ; echo)

Configure Grafana with Prometheus

Finally we need to set-up our Grafana Dashboard. Luckily for us, Dapr provides some out-of-the-box dashboards

To start, we load the dashboard and add our Prometheus Server

As a URL we fetch the Dapr Prometheus Server url by viewing the services and finding the name of the deployment. Which will become <DEPLOYMENT_NAME>.<NAMESPACE>

kubectl get svc -n dapr-monitoring

In our case this becomes http://dapr-prom-prometheus-server.dapr-monitoring

Now we can Save & Test and go towads the import screen, where we import the dashboard that we copied from ]Dapr its GitHub page.](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dapr/dapr/master/grafana/grafana-system-services-dashboard.json)

If everything is done correctly, we can now see our monitoring