Building a Monitoring dashboard with Kubernetes and Grafana.
Tags: kubernetes, devops, python, programming
Published: 2022-12-23 18:10:02

Grafana and Prometheus are popular tools for visualizing and monitoring metrics in a Kubernetes cluster. By integrating Grafana with Prometheus, you can create dashboards and panels that display various metrics, including CPU and memory usage, network throughput, and more. This can help you identify performance issues, troubleshoot problems, and optimize the performance of your cluster.

Here are some things you can do with Grafana and Prometheus to tune the performance of the Kubernetes cluster:

**Monitor resource usage:** By creating panels that display CPU, memory, and other resource usage metrics, you can identify which components of your cluster are consuming the most resources, and take steps to optimize their performance.

**Analyze request latencies:** By creating panels that display request latencies and response times, you can identify bottlenecks in your cluster and take steps to improve performance.

**Identify spikes and anomalies:** By using Grafana’s anomaly detection features, you can identify unusual spikes or dips in your metrics, and investigate their root cause.

**Set alerts and notifications:** By setting up alerts and notifications in Grafana, you can be notified when certain thresholds are crossed, or when certain conditions are met, so you can take timely action to address performance issues.

Integrating Kubernetes with Grafana needs RBAC roles and grafana installation on the Kubernetes cluster. Let’s tackle one problem at once.


**1. Configure Grafana RBAC roles and permissions**
Grafana provides Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to control access to the various features and functions of the platform. In Grafana, users can be organized into organizations, and organizations can be assigned roles that define the level of access and permissions they have within the platform.

To configure RBAC roles and permissions in Grafana, you will need to access the Grafana configuration file (usually located at /etc/grafana/grafana.ini) and the Grafana database.

Here are the steps to configure RBAC roles and permissions in Grafana:

1. - Locate the [auth.anonymous] the section in the Grafana configuration file and set the enabled option to true to enable anonymous access to Grafana. This will allow users to access Grafana without logging in.
2. - In the [auth.anonymous] section, set the org_role option to the role you want anonymous users to have. For example, to give anonymous users the Viewer role, set org_role = Viewer.
3. - In the [auth.ldap] section, set the enabled option to true to enable LDAP authentication. This will allow users to log in to Grafana using their LDAP credentials.
4. - In the [auth.ldap] section, set the default_role option to the role you want to assign to LDAP users by default. For example, to give LDAP users the Editor role by default, set default_role = Editor.
5. - In the [auth.ldap] section set the allow_sign_up option to true to allow users to sign up for Grafana using their LDAP credentials.
6. - In the [auth.ldap] section, configure the LDAP server connection settings, including the server, bind_dn, and bind_password options.
7. - In the [auth.ldap] section, configure the LDAP user search settings, including the search_filter, search_base_dns, and search_bind_dn options.
8. - In the Grafana database, create a new organization and assign the desired roles to the organization.
9. - In the Grafana database, create new users and assign them to the appropriate organization.
10. - By configuring the RBAC roles and permissions in this way, you can control access to the various features and functions of Grafana based on the role and organization of each user.

Here is an example of the code you might use to configure RBAC roles and permissions in Grafana:

```
[auth.anonymous]
# Enable anonymous access
enabled = true
# Set the default role for anonymous users
org_role = Viewer
[auth.ldap]
# Enable LDAP authentication
enabled = true
# Set the default role for LDAP users
default_role = Editor
# Allow users to sign up for Grafana using their LDAP credentials
allow_sign_up = true
# Configure LDAP server connection settings
server = ldap://ldap.example.com
bind_dn = cn=admin,dc=example,dc=com
bind_password = password
# Configure LDAP user search settings
search_filter = (sAMAccountName=%s)
search_base_dns = dc=example,dc=com
search_bind_dn = cn=admin,dc=example,dc=com
```

To create a new organization and assign roles to it in the Grafana database, you can use SQL commands like the following:

```
-- Create a new organization
INSERT INTO org (name) VALUES ('My Organization');
-- Get the ID of the new organization
SELECT id FROM org WHERE name = 'My Organization';
-- Assign the Viewer role to the organization
INSERT INTO org_role (org_id, role) VALUES (1, 'Viewer');
-- Assign the Editor role to the organization
INSERT INTO org_role (org_id, role) VALUES (1, 'Editor');
```

To create a new user and assign them to an organization in the Grafana database, you can use SQL commands like the following:

```
-- Create a new user
INSERT INTO user (login, email, name) VALUES ('user1', 'user1@example.com', 'User 1');
-- Get the ID of the new user
SELECT id FROM user WHERE login = 'user1';-- Assign the user to the organization
INSERT INTO user_org (org_id, user_id, role) VALUES (1, 1, 'Viewer');
```

**2. Kubernetes setup**

To install and set up Grafana on a Kubernetes cluster, you can follow these steps:

Deploy the Grafana Helm chart:

```
helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm install grafana grafana/grafana
```
Verify that the Grafana pod is running:

`kubectl get pods -n default`

Forward the Grafana service to your local machine:

`kubectl port-forward service/grafana -n default 3000:3000`

Open your web browser and go to http://localhost:3000. You should see the Grafana login page.

Login with the default username and password (admin/admin).

Click on the “Add data source” button and add your data source. Grafana supports a wide range of data sources, including Prometheus, InfluxDB, and more.

Create a dashboard and add panels to display your metrics. You can use the query editor to customize the metrics that are displayed in each panel.

**3. Grafana setup**
To set up Grafana on Kubernetes, you will need to create a Kubernetes deployment and service to run Grafana in a container. You will also need to set up persistent storage for Grafana to ensure that your data is preserved across restarts and failures.

Here are the steps to set up Grafana on Kubernetes:

Install the Kubernetes command-line tool kubectl and set up a connection to your Kubernetes cluster.

Create a configuration file for the Grafana deployment. This file should specify the container image for Grafana, the number of replicas to run, and any environment variables or volume mounts you need. For example:

```
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: grafana-test
  labels:
    app: grafana-test
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: grafana-test1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: grafana-test1
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: grafana-test2
        image: grafana/grafana:7.4.5
        env:
        - name: GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD
          value: secret
        volumeMounts:
        - name: grafana-storage
          mountPath: /var/lib/grafana
      volumes:
      - name: grafana-storage
        persistentVolumeClaim:
          claimName: grafana-storage-claim
```
Create a configuration file for the Grafana service. This file should specify the type of service you want to create (e.g. ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer) and the port mapping for the Grafana container. For example:

```
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: grafana-test
  labels:
    app: grafana-test
spec:
  type: LoadBalancer
  ports:
  - port: 3000
    targetPort: 3000
  selector:
    app: grafana
```

Create a persistent volume claim to provide persistent storage for Grafana. This will allow Grafana to store its data across restarts and failures.

```
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: grafana-storage-claim
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi
```

Use kubectl to apply the deployment, service, and persistent volume claim configuration files to your Kubernetes cluster.

```
kubectl apply -f grafana-deployment.yaml
kubectl apply -f grafana-service.yaml
kubectl apply -f grafana-storage.yaml
```
Wait for the Grafana pod to be up and running. You can use the following command to check the status of the pod:

`kubectl get pods -l app=grafana-test`

Once the Grafana pod is running, you can access the Grafana web interface by visiting the service URL.

**Conclusion**
Grafana is a popular open-source data visualization and monitoring platform that can be used to monitor and visualize data from a variety of sources, including Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that can be used to deploy, manage and scale containerized applications.

Building production-grade monitoring tools are very critical and building them efficiently is critical. This demo illustrates on how to integrate performant and advanced open-source tools and build monitoring services to track, isolate, remediate and mitigate enterprise-grade issues.

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