How to import custom dashboards to grafana using helm

10
votes

I'm trying to understand helm and I wonder if someone could ELI5 to me something or help me with something.

So i did run below:

helm repo add coreos https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/coreos-charts/stable/

Then I installed kube-prometheus by using below: 

helm install coreos/kube-prometheus --name kube-prometheus -f values.yaml --namespace monitoringtest

Everything works fine but I'm trying to add some custom dashboards from json files and I'm struggling to understand how to do it.

I was following this: https://blogcodevalue.wordpress.com/2018/09/16/automate-grafana-dashboard-import-process/

In my values.yaml I added below

serverDashboardConfigmaps:
  - example-dashboards

I understand that if I do:

helm upgrade --install kube-prometheus -f values.yaml --namespace monitoringtest coreos/kube-prometheus

That should cause grafana to pickup a below configmap called example-dashboards and load *.json files from custom-dashboards folder. 

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: example-dashboards
data:
{{ (.Files.Glob "custom-dashboards/*.json").AsConfig | indent 2 }}

# Or
# 
# data:
#   custom-dashboard.json: |-
# {{ (.Files.Get "custom.json") | indent 4 }}
#
# The filename (and consequently the key under data) must be in the format `xxx-dashboard.json` or `xxx-datasource.json`
# for them to be picked up.

Now two questions:

How do I add above configmap to this helm release?

Where is this custom-dashboards folder located? Is it on my laptop and then is send to grafana?

Do I need to copy all of https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/coreos-charts/stable/ onto my laptop?

Sorry for explaining everything but I'm just trying to understand this.

2
kubernetesgrafanakubernetes-helmconfigmap
I also faced that once upon a time. They use grafana-watcher sidecar which uploads dashboards and datasources into Grafana on startup. Actually, the way it does it is very prone to errors and i found it impossible to use on daily basis. I don't recommend you to go that route. What I do is use Grafana Provisioning: grafana.com/docs/administration/provisioning. So I simply mount dashboards into Grafana to /etc/grafana/provisioning/dashboards/ directory. One downside of it is that you cannot anymore save dashboards in Grafana UI - only export as JSON and upload to Git. - Vasili Angapov
Thanks but i don't think I can do that using helm? - tr53
Why not, you can modify Helm chart to do it. I also did it, but there were many modifications to original Helm chart. May be I can share some days later... - Vasili Angapov
I think this is for now beyond my helm skills. - tr53
is it possible to link dashboards as URL? This example seems to show it: github.com/grafana/helm-charts/blob/main/charts/grafana/… - aholbreich

2 Answers

4
votes

I partially figured it out. I can load dashboards from a configmap. Not from separate json files yet but it'a progress.

For anyone interested I put this on my github page: https://github.com/tretos53/notes/blob/master/Grafana/Readme.MD

4
votes

You can find a good example of how to do this in the charts for prometheus-operator here:

https://github.com/helm/charts/tree/master/stable/prometheus-operator/templates/grafana

It is a ConfigMapList that gets all JSONs from a given directory and stores them into ConfigMaps which are read by Grafana.

{{- $files := .Files.Glob "dashboards/*.json" }}
{{- if $files }}
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMapList
items:
{{- range $path, $fileContents := $files }}
{{- $dashboardName := regexReplaceAll "(^.*/)(.*)\\.json$" $path "${2}" }}
- apiVersion: v1
  kind: ConfigMap
  metadata:
    name: {{ printf "%s-%s" (include "prometheus-operator.fullname" $) $dashboardName | trunc 63 | trimSuffix "-" }}
    namespace: {{ template "prometheus-operator.namespace" . }}
    labels:
      {{- if $.Values.grafana.sidecar.dashboards.label }}
      {{ $.Values.grafana.sidecar.dashboards.label }}: "1"
      {{- end }}
      app: {{ template "prometheus-operator.name" $ }}-grafana
{{ include "prometheus-operator.labels" $ | indent 6 }}
  data:
    {{ $dashboardName }}.json: {{ $.Files.Get $path | toJson }}
{{- end }}
{{- end }}

Mind that the size of a ConfigMap might be limited: https://stackoverflow.com/a/53015758/4252480