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How to Install Grafana with K10 Dashboard and Data Sources Pre-provisioned

KB ID: 4635
Product: Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes | 7
Published: 2024-07-08
Last Modified: 2024-09-13
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Purpose

Starting in Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes v7.5.0, Grafana will no longer be included by default.

This in-depth technical guide will demonstrate the process of installing Grafana on Kubernetes and populating it with Kasten Data. It will allow you to quickly access pre-provisioned Kasten Dashboards in Grafana, which can be customized to suit your business requirements.

Solution

Note
Please make sure to set up external Grafana instance before upgrading Kasten to the version 7.5.0 because that version removes Grafana as a sub chart.

Grafana Deployment Options on Kubernetes

A new instance of Grafana OSS can be installed on Kubernetes using the following three primary methods:

Method Documented in this Article

This article will document the recommended method, installing Grafana using helm chart and customizing it using values.yaml so that it gets installed with the K10 Grafana dashboard and data source.

About Helm

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that simplifies the distribution and installation of applications on Kubernetes clusters. Application configurations can easily be changed/modified during installation by providing a custom configuration file using the '-f' or '--values' flag with the helm install command.

Preparing Helm values for Grafana Installation

To configure the new Grafana instance with the Kasten dashboard and appropriate data source, a values.yaml file must be created and later passed to the helm install command.

Please start by creating a values.yaml file where you will add custom configurations for the Grafana instance.

The steps below specify the Helm fields that can be used to configure specific configuration/settings of Grafana.

Persistent Storage

As mentioned in the Grafana docs, persistent storage is disabled by default in Grafana, which means it will use ephemeral storage, and all of its data will be stored within the container's file system. This data will be lost if the container is stopped, restarted, or if the container crashes. To prevent data loss, we must configure the installation to persist changes into a volume.

To configure this, add the below field to the values.yaml file:

persistence:
  enabled: true

K10 Grafana Dashboard

K10's Grafana dashboard is already published on the Grafana dashboard index https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/21065-k10-dashboard/ that can be used in values.yaml to configure the dashboard.

Ensure the K10 Grafana Dashboard is automatically created in the newly installed Grafana by configuring the dashboards field in the values.yaml file as shown here:

dashboardProviders:
  dashboardproviders.yaml:
    apiVersion: 1
    providers:
    - name: 'default'
      orgId: 1
      folder: ''
      type: file
      disableDeletion: false
      editable: true
      options:
        path: /var/lib/grafana/dashboards/default

dashboards:
  default:
    k10-dashboard:
      gnetId: 21065
      revision: 1
      datasource:
      - name: DS_PROMETHEUS
        value: Prometheus
      - name: VAR_CLUSTER
        value: ""

Data Source

As we can see in the snippet above, the K10 Grafana dashboard relies on a Prometheus data source.

This data source can be configured using the datasources field of the values.yaml file as shown below:

Please replace <kasten-namespace> in the url attribute with the namespace where Kasten is installed.

datasources:
  datasources.yaml:
    apiVersion: 1
    datasources:
    - access: proxy
      editable: false
      isDefault: true
      jsonData:
        timeInterval: 1m
      name: Prometheus
      type: prometheus
      url: http://prometheus-server.<kasten-namespace>/k10/prometheus/
Independent Prometheus Instance URL
If the Prometheus instance is installed separately and is not part of Kasten, the appropriate URL needs to be used while configuring the data source above.

SMTP Configuration (Optional)

If you need to configure SMTP settings to enable the email alerts, the settings (server, user, password) must be provided to the Grafana instance.

Below are the helm fields in the values.yaml that can be used to enable SMTP in Grafana:

grafana.ini:
  smtp:
    enabled: true
    host: <SMTP.SERVER.COM:PORT>
    user: <SMTP_USER>
    password: <SMTP_PASSWORD>
    skip_verify: true
    from_address: <EMAIL_TO_BE_USED_AS_SENDER>
    from_name: <SENDER_NAME_FOR_THE_EMAIL>

Installing the New Grafana instance

Once all of the above entries are made in the values.yaml file, the command below can be used to install the Grafana instance:

helm upgrade my-grafana grafana/grafana -n monitoring -f values.yaml --install --create-namespace

Example:

$ helm upgrade my-grafana grafana/grafana -n monitoring -f values.yaml --install --create-namespace
Release "my-grafana" does not exist. Installing it now.
NAME: my-grafana
LAST DEPLOYED: Thu Jun  6 17:40:36 2024
NAMESPACE: monitoring
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
NOTES:
1. Get your 'admin' user password by running:
   kubectl get secret --namespace monitoring my-grafana -o jsonpath="{.data.admin-password}" | base64 --decode ; echo
2. The Grafana server can be accessed via port 80 on the following DNS name from within your cluster:
   my-grafana.monitoring.svc.cluster.local
   Get the Grafana URL to visit by running these commands in the same shell:
     export POD_NAME=$(kubectl get pods --namespace monitoring -l "app.kubernetes.io/name=grafana,app.kubernetes.io/instance=my-grafana" -o jsonpath="{.items[0].metadata.name}")
     kubectl --namespace monitoring port-forward $POD_NAME 3000
3. Login with the password from step 1 and the username: admin 

As mentioned in the output of the helm install command, the kubectl port-forward command can be used to access the newly installed Grafana. Data sources and dashboards can also be checked to ensure the configured ones have been created.

Based on the requirement, the respective helm field can be configured if the Grafana instance needs to be exposed via a LoadBalancer service or Ingress resource. An exhaustive list of supported helm fields can be found in the Grafana Helm Chart Documentation.

Migrating Grafana Resources

The following steps may be performed if there is a need to migrate other Grafana resources (e.g., alert rules and contact points) to the newly installed Grafana instance.

Back-Up

First, a backup of the existing Grafana instance needs to be created.

The following command can be used to backup the Grafana database that gets installed with K10:

kubectl cp <kasten-namespace>/<grafana-podname>:<GF_PATHS_DATA>/grafana.db grafana.db
The environment variable GF_PATHS_DATA can be checked in the Grafana pod to determine the correct Grafana data path.

Restore

Once the backup has been taken, the backup file (grafana.db) must be copied/restored to the newly installed Grafana pod at the correct location (GF_PATHS_DATA). 

The following command can be used to copy/restore the backup file (grafana.db) to the newly installed Grafana pod:

kubectl cp grafana.db <new-grafana-namespace>/<grafana-pod-name>:<GF_PATHS_DATA>/grafana.db

Restart Grafana

After the database backup file has been restored to the newly installed Grafana pod, the Grafana instance needs to be restarted.

To restart the Grafana pod, scale down the Grafana deployment to 0 replicas and then scale it up back to 1 replicas:

kubectl scale deployment -n monitoring my-grafana --replicas 0
kubectl scale deployment -n monitoring my-grafana --replicas 1

Reset Admin Password

Once the database file is restored and the Grafana pod is restarted, the admin password of the newly installed Grafana instance changes to what it was in the original Grafana instance. 

To change that admin password, execute the following command in the Grafana pod to change the admin password:

grafana-cli admin reset-admin-password <new-password>
After running this command, you should be able to log in to the newly installed Grafana instance and view all the alerting-related resources.
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