grafana-dashboards-kubernetes

Description
Features
Dashboards
Installation
Contributing

Description

This repository contains a modern set of Grafana dashboards for Kubernetes.
They are inspired by many other dashboards from kubernetes-mixin and grafana.com.

More information about them in my article: A set of modern Grafana dashboards for Kubernetes

You can also download them on Grafana.com.

Features

Theses dashboards are made and tested for the kube-prometheus-stack chart, but they should work well with others as soon as you have kube-state-metrics and prometheus-node-exporter installed on your Kubernetes cluster.

They are not backward compatible with older Grafana versions because they try to take advantage of Grafana's newest features like:

gradient mode introduced in Grafana 8.1 (Grafana Blog post)
time series visualization panel introduced in Grafana 7.4 (Grafana Blog post)
$__rate_interval variable introduced in Grafana 7.2 (Grafana Blog post)

They also have a Prometheus Datasource variable so they will work on a federated Grafana instance.

As an example, here's how the Kubernetes / Views / Global dashboard looks like:

Dashboards

File name	Description	Screenshot
k8s-addons-starboard-operator.json	Dashboard for the Starboard Operator from Aqua Security.	LINK
k8s-system-api-server.json	Dashboard for the API Server Kubernetes.	LINK
k8s-system-coredns.json	Show information on the CoreDNS Kubernetes component.	LINK
k8s-views-global.json	`Global` level view dashboard for Kubernetes.	LINK
k8s-views-namespaces.json	`Namespaces` level view dashboard for Kubernetes.	LINK
k8s-views-nodes.json	`Nodes` level view dashboard for Kubernetes.	LINK
k8s-views-pods.json	`Pods` level view dashboard for Kubernetes.	LINK

Installation

In most installation cases, you will need to clone this repository (or your fork):

git clone https://github.com/dotdc/grafana-dashboards-kubernetes.git
cd grafana-dashboards-kubernetes

Install manually

On the WebUI of your Grafana instance, put your mouse over the + sign on the left menu, then click on Import.
Once you are on the Import page, you can upload the JSON files one by one from your local copy using the Upload JSON file button.

Install via grafana.com

On the WebUI of your Grafana instance, put your mouse over the + sign on the left menu, then click on Import.
Once you are on the Import page, you can put the grafana.com dashboard id (see table bellow) under Import via grafana.com then click on the Load button. Repeat for each dashboard.

Grafana.com dashboard id list:

Dashboard	ID
k8s-addons-starboard-operator.json	16337
k8s-system-api-server.json	15761
k8s-system-coredns.json	15762
k8s-views-global.json	15757
k8s-views-namespaces.json	15758
k8s-views-nodes.json	15759
k8s-views-pods.json	15760

Install with ArgoCD

If you have ArgoCD, this will deploy the dashboards in ArgoCD's default project:

kubectl apply -f argocd-app.yml

Install with Helm values

If you use the official Grafana helm chart or kube-prometheus-stack, you can install the dashboards directly using the dashboardProviders & dashboards helm chart values.

Depending on your setup, add or merge the following block example to your helm chart values.
The example is for kube-prometheus-stack, for the official Grafana helm chart, remove the first line (grafana:), and reduce the indentation level of the entire block.

grafana:
  # Provision grafana-dashboards-kubernetes
  dashboardProviders:
    dashboardproviders.yaml:
      apiVersion: 1
      providers:
      - name: 'grafana-dashboards-kubernetes'
        orgId: 1
        folder: 'Kubernetes'
        type: file
        disableDeletion: true
        editable: true
        options:
          path: /var/lib/grafana/dashboards/grafana-dashboards-kubernetes
  dashboards:
    grafana-dashboards-kubernetes:
      k8s-system-api-server:
        url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotdc/grafana-dashboards-kubernetes/master/dashboards/k8s-system-api-server.json
        token: ''
      k8s-system-coredns:
        url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotdc/grafana-dashboards-kubernetes/master/dashboards/k8s-system-coredns.json
        token: ''
      k8s-views-global:
        url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotdc/grafana-dashboards-kubernetes/master/dashboards/k8s-views-global.json
        token: ''
      k8s-views-namespaces:
        url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotdc/grafana-dashboards-kubernetes/master/dashboards/k8s-views-namespaces.json
        token: ''
      k8s-views-nodes:
        url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotdc/grafana-dashboards-kubernetes/master/dashboards/k8s-views-nodes.json
        token: ''
      k8s-views-pods:
        url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotdc/grafana-dashboards-kubernetes/master/dashboards/k8s-views-pods.json
        token: ''

Install as ConfigMaps

Grafana dashboards can be provisionned as Kubernetes ConfigMaps if you configure the dashboard sidecar available on the official Grafana Helm Chart.

To build the ConfigMaps and output them on STDOUT :

kubectl kustomize .

Note: no namespace is set by default, you can change that in the kustomization.yaml file.

To build and deploy them directly on your kubernetes cluster :

kubectl apply -k . -n monitoring

Note: you can change the namespace if needed.

Install as ConfigMaps with Terraform

If you use terraform to provision your Kubernetes resources, you can convert the generated ConfigMaps to Terraform code using tfk8s.

To build and convert ConfigMaps to Terraform code :

kubectl kustomize . | tfk8s