Docsy Blog on grafana-operator

Grafana-Operator - A small subproject that made it big

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Grafana-Operator - A small subproject that made it big

This blog post will describe the journey that the grafana-operator underwent, from a small subproject from within a Red Hat product offering, to one silently being used by some of the biggest companies worldwide, as well as where it’s going to next!

The Origin

Disclaimer: Most of the information written in this section is from before my time being involved with the project, written to the best of my knowledge.

Moving Upstream

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Exciting times coming up!

The community folks over at upstream Grafana, have reached out and asked if we’d be open to migrating the Grafana-Operator to their https://github.com/grafana organization! We said “YES!”

Why?

Ever since we moved away from our initial Integr8ly home, (where Peter first created the operator) we have focused on growing the community and improving the user experience as best we could, we believe that moving to upstream Grafana is the next logical step.

v4 to v5 migration

Sat, 27 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We are getting close to releasing version 5 of grafana-operator.

Version 5 comes with a number of breaking changes in API which were required to introduce support for managing multiple Grafana instances (including externally-hosted), arbitrary Grafana configuration (we no longer need to explicitly support each configuration field in grafana.ini), and other useful features. A more comprehensive list of changes can be found in our intro blog post , and full documentation - here .

Install Grafana-operator using Flux and Kustomize

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As a part of grafana-operator v5.0.0-rc1 we introduce Kustomize as a way of installing the operator.

To showcase this new feature, I thought why not use GitOps?

GitOps is a rather well-used term nowadays, but you can summarize it in 4 steps.

Declarative
Versioned and immutable
Pulled automatically
Continuously reconciled

To find out more about GitOps look at the CNCF GitOps working groups documentation .

In this case I have decided to use Flux to deploy grafana-operator through GitOps, but there are other options. For example ArgoCD which is also a graduated CNCF project just like Flux.

Version 5 getting started

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It might be a good idea to read through the version 5 introduction which goes through a bit more about the new concepts that we have introduced in this version. In this blog we will focus on how to install version 5 of the grafana-operator.

For this example we will be using a small kind cluster to get access to Kubernetes but this should of course work with any other Kubernetes installation.

Version 5 RC introduction

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

If you are reading this it means that we have finally got our first RC of version 5 out of the gates. The maintainers are extremely happy to finally being able to do so.

As a part of this we have merged version 5 in to the master branch and we will continue to support version 4 through the v4 branch. Any changes that needs to be done towards version 4 should be directed to that branch.