Operations and Observability

Grafana Operator Operational Monitoring

Dashboard

By default we provide a Dashboard that leverages the operator metrics to give a overview of the operator state. This dashboard is based on the Grafana Operator Dashboard (ID 22785).

The dashboard provides insights into the operator’s performance and health within your Kubernetes cluster. You can enable it by using Helm, or alternatively, by manually creating the dashboard via a Grafana.com link or the provided JSON definition.

Enabling the Dashboard with Helm

To enable the dashboard using Helm, you must set the following values in your values.yaml:

dashboard:
  enabled: true

When enabled, Helm will create a ConfigMap containing the Grafana Operator dashboard definition as part of your deployment.

The Dashboard by default gets created inside a ConfigMap to avoid the chicken and egg problems that arrise when we use operator-managed Custom Resources in the same chart that is deploying the Custom Resource Definitions.

If your Grafana instance has a sidecar looking for ConfigMaps containing dashboards, then leveraging the dashboard.labels values we can manipulate the dashboard ConfigMap labels and annotations so that the sidecar can find it and load the dashboard into Grafana.

Helm Values Breakdown

Alternative Methods for Loading the Dashboard

If you are not using Helm, or prefer using the Operator Custom Resources, then you can load the Grafana dashboard in the following ways:

Option 1: Load the Dashboard from Grafana.com

You can manually create a GrafanaDashboard Custom Resource (CR) to point to the Grafana.com dashboard.

To create the Grafana dashboard, use the following Custom Resource definition:

---
apiVersion: grafana.integreatly.org/v1beta1
kind: GrafanaDashboard
metadata:
  name: grafana-operator-dashboard-id
spec:
  instanceSelector:
    matchLabels:
      dashboards: "grafana"
  grafanaCom:
    id: 22785
    revision: 2

Note that using the above mentioned grafana.com reference you are using a community maintained version of the Dashboard. Revisions might change, and different changes might exist between the JSON definition provided locally in the Grafana-Operator Repository.

Option 2: Use the JSON Definition

Alternatively, you can use the JSON definition of the dashboard. The files/dashboard.json file contains the complete dashboard definition.

To use it, create a GrafanaDashboard Custom Resource (CR) pointing to the JSON definition:

---
apiVersion: grafana.integreatly.org/v1beta1
kind: GrafanaDashboard
metadata:
  name: grafana-operator-dashboard-remote-json
spec:
  instanceSelector:
    matchLabels:
      dashboards: "grafana"
  url: "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grafana/grafana-operator/refs/heads/master/deploy/helm/grafana-operator/files/dashboard.json"

Option 3: Use the Helm generated ConfigMap in a CR

If we enable ConfigMap creation through the Helm values but cannot rely on the sidecar approach to load the dashboard into Grafana, we can still create a GrafanaDashboard Custom Resource (CR) that references the ConfigMap.

To use this approach, create a GrafanaDashboard CR that points to the existing ConfigMap:

---
apiVersion: grafana.integreatly.org/v1beta1
kind: GrafanaDashboard
metadata:
  name: grafana-operator-dashboard-from-configmap
spec:
  instanceSelector:
    matchLabels:
      dashboards: "grafana"
  configMapRef:
    name: grafana-operator-dashboard
    key: grafana-operator.json