Deploying Grafana to Kubernetes Using App Template

Objective

This tutorial shows you how to quickly deploy a Grafana application in KubeSphere via an Application Template, demonstrating the basic functionality of the application repository, application templates, and application management.

Prerequisites

You need to install KubeSphere.

Hands-on Lab

Step 1: Add an Application Repository

Note:

The application repository can be either the Object Storage, e.g. QingStor Object Storage, AWS S3, Helm Repository or GitHub Repository. The packages are composed of Helm Chart template files of the applications. Therefore, before adding an application repository to KubeSphere, you need to create an object storage and upload Helm packages in advance. This tutorial prepares a demo repository based on QingStor Object Storage.

Sign in with an admin account and navigate to Platform → Platform Settings → App Repositories, then click Add App Repository.

Fill in the basic information, name it "demo-repo" and input the URL with https://helm-chart-repo.pek3a.qingstor.com/kubernetes-charts/, you can validate if this URL is available, then choose OK when you've done.

Click App Templates on the top of this page, it will automatically import all of the applications from the demo repository.

Step 2: Deploy the Grafana Application

When you've already added the repository, you can log out and sign in with project-regular account. Then select App Templates on the top of this page, input "grafana" in the search box to find the application.

Click into Grafana, click Deploy App and fill in the basic information.

The Name can be customized by yourself. Choose the corresponding Workspace (e.g. demo-workspace) and Project (e.g. demo-project) as the environment. Then choose Deploy to deploy Grafana to KubeSphere.

Navigate back to the demo-project and choose Applications, then you can see the application grafana showing activefrom the application list.

Step 3: View App Details

Click into a grafana application, you will be able to see its Services and Workloads in Resource Status page, as well as Environmental Variables and App Template information.

Next, we are going to expose this service outside of the cluster via NodePort. Enter into its service grafana-l47bmc, then click More → Edit Internet Access.

Select NodePort from the drop-down list.

It will generate a Node Port, for example, here is 31126 that we can access using <$NodeIP>:<$NodePort>.

Step 4: Access the Grafana Service

At this point, you will be able to access the Grafana service via http://${Node IP}:${NODEPORT}  (e.g.http://192.168.0.88:31126), or click the button Click to visit to access the Grafana dashboard.

Note that you have to obtain the account and password from the Grafana secret in advance. Navigate to Configuration Center → Secrets, and click into grafana-l47bmc (Type: Default).

Click the button to display the secret information, then copy and paste the value of admin-user and admin-password.

Open the Grafana log in page (e.g. http://192.168.0.88:31126) and sign in with the admin account.

At this point, you can add your data source (e.g. Prometheus) into Grafana, and inspect the monitoring dashboard in the next step.