GCP Monitor & Stateless Grafana

This repository is an example of how to visualize data from Google Cloud Monitoring (formerly known as Stackdriver) using Grafana in a stateless fashion with provisioned dashboards and datasources. The advantage of this approach is that you can access your Grafana dashboards through Docker containers even on your local machine, and if you shut it down and restart you'd still have access to the same data and dashboards. This also makes GitOps possible by putting the dashboard configurations under version control.

This approach is inspired by another repo.

Prepare the access keys

In order to access monitoring data on the Google Cloud Platform we'll create a new service account and configure access for that following the instructions from the Grafana docs.

First step is to create the service account.

PROJECT_ID=...  # set to the project to be monitored
SA_GRAFANA=sac-grafana

gcloud iam service-accounts create $SA_GRAFANA \
    --display-name="Grafana Monitoring" \
    --project=$PROJECT_ID

Assign permissions to the newly created service account.

IAM_ACCOUNT="$SA_GRAFANA@$PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com"

gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding $PROJECT_ID \
    --member="serviceAccount:$IAM_ACCOUNT" \
    --role="roles/monitoring.viewer"

Now let's create a key (assuming that your organizational policies allow that, if not you can turn constraints/iam.disableServiceAccountKeyCreation off, or opt for the alternative GCE authentication which requires you to run the Grafana instance on GCE).

KEY_FILE="$SA_GRAFANA-key.json"

gcloud iam service-accounts keys create $KEY_FILE \
    --iam-account=$IAM_ACCOUNT \
    --project=$PROJECT_ID

Once we've got the key file we can start setting up the configuration. First let's put the secret in an environment variable so we can pass it to the docker run command.

SA_SECRET=`jq -r '.private_key' $KEY_FILE`

Build and run the image

The process of building and running the Docker image is pretty straight forward. All you need to do is to pass the environment variables that have been created in the previous steps to the container.

IMG_TAG=gcp-monitor-grafana:1
docker build -t $IMG_TAG .
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 \
    -e PROJECT_ID="$PROJECT_ID" \
    -e SA_GRAFANA="$IAM_ACCOUNT" \
    -e SA_SECRET="$SA_SECRET" \
    -e GF_LOG_MODE=file \
    -e GF_LOG_LEVEL=debug \
    $IMG_TAG

Authentication & OAuth

The default username/password for Grafana is admin/admin, which you can change after first login. You can also set a strong password and pass that as an enviroment variable. You can make up a strong password yourself, or use a utility. The example below uses openssl, but you could use anything you like.

GRAFANA_ADMIN_PASSWORD=`openssl rand -base64 32`

docker run -d -p 3000:3000 \
    -e GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD="$GRAFANA_ADMIN_PASSWORD" \
    ...  # set other environment variables too
    $IMG_TAG

Additionally you can give access to users through Google Cloud OAuth2 as described in the Grafana docs. Follow the instructions to create the OAuth keys (after having configured the consent screen). Once you've downloaded the keys, you can pass the configuration again as environment variables instead of editing the grafana.ini config file.

OAUTH_CLIENT_ID=...  
OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET=...  
OAUTH_AUTH_URL="https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth"
OAUTH_TOKEN_URL="https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/token"

docker run -d -p 3000:3000 \
    -e GF_AUTH_GOOGLE_ENABLED="true" \
    -e GF_AUTH_GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID="$OAUTH_CLIENT_ID" \
    -e GF_AUTH_GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET="$OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET" \
    -e GF_AUTH_GOOGLE_AUTH_URL="$OAUTH_AUTH_URL" \
    -e GF_AUTH_GOOGLE_TOKEN_URL="$OAUTH_TOKEN_URL" \
    ...  # set other environment variables too
    $IMG_TAG

meken/gcp-monitor-grafana

GCP Monitor & Stateless Grafana

Prepare the access keys

Build and run the image

Authentication & OAuth