I want to deploy Grafana using Kubernetes, but I don't know how to attach provisioned dashboards to the Pod. Storing them as key-value data in a configMap seems to me like a nightmare - example here https://github.com/do-community/doks-monitoring/blob/master/manifest/dashboards-configmap.yaml - in my case it would me much more JSON dashboards - thus the harsh opinion.
I didn't had an issue with configuring the Grafana settings, datasources and dashboard providers as configMaps since they are defined in single files, but the dashboards situation is a little bit more tricky for me.
All of my dashboards are stored in the repo under "/files/dashboards/", and I wondered how to make them available to the Pod, besides the way described earlier. Wondered about using the hostPath object for a sec, but didn't make sense for multi-node deployment on different hosts.
Maybe its easy - but I'm fairly new to Kubernetes and can't figure it out - so any help would be much appreciated. Thank you!
You can automatically generate a ConfigMap from a set fo files in a directory. Each file will be a key-value pair in the ConfigMap with the file name being the key and the file content being the value (like in your linked example but done automatically instead of manually).
Assuming that your dashboard files are stored as, for example:
files/dashboards/
├── k8s-cluster-rsrc-use.json
├── k8s-node-rsrc-use.json
└── k8s-resources-cluster.jsonYou can run the following command to directly create the ConfigMap in the cluster:
kubectl create configmap my-config --from-file=files/dashboardsIf you prefer to only generate the YAML manifest for the ConfigMap, you can do:
kubectl create configmap my-config --from-file=files/dashboards --dry-run -o yaml >my-config.yamlYou could look into these options:
Use a persistent volume.
Store the JSON files for the dashboards in a code repo like git, file repository like nexus, or a plain web server, and use init container to get the files before the application (Grafana) container is started and put them on a volume shared between the init container and the application (Grafana) container. This example could be a good starting point.
Notice that this doesn't require a persistent volume. See in the example - it uses a volume of type emptyDir.