Grafana Operator is a Kubernetes operator that enables the installation and management of Grafana instances, dashboards and plugins.

Overview of Grafana Operator

Trademarks: This software listing is packaged by Bitnami. The respective trademarks mentioned in the offering are owned by the respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation or endorsement.

$ helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
$ helm install my-release bitnami/grafana-operator

Bitnami charts for Helm are carefully engineered, actively maintained and are the quickest and easiest way to deploy containers on a Kubernetes cluster that are ready to handle production workloads.

This chart bootstraps a Grafana Operator Deployment Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager.

Bitnami charts can be used with Kubeapps for deployment and management of Helm Charts in clusters. This Helm chart has been tested on top of Bitnami Kubernetes Production Runtime (BKPR). Deploy BKPR to get automated TLS certificates, logging and monitoring for your applications.

• Kubernetes 1.19
• Helm 3.2.0

To install the chart with the release name my-release:

$ helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
$ helm install my-release bitnami/grafana-operator

These commands deploy grafana-operator on the Kubernetes cluster in the default configuration. The Parameters section lists the parameters that can be configured during installation.

Tip: List all releases using helm list

To uninstall/delete the my-release helm release:

$ helm uninstall my-release

The command removes all the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release.

The Bitnami catalog offers both the bitnami/grafana and bitnami/grafana-operator charts. Each solution covers different needs and use cases.

• The bitnami/grafana chart deploys a single Grafana installation (with Grafana Image Renderer) using a Kubernetes Deployment object (together with Services, PVCs, ConfigMaps, etc.). Its lifecycle is managed using Helm and, at the Grafana container level, the following operations are automated: persistence management, configuration based on environment variables and plugin initialization. The chart also allows deploying dashboards and data sources using ConfigMaps. The Deployments do not require any ServiceAccounts with special RBAC privileges so this solution would fit better in more restricted Kubernetes installations.

• The bitnami/grafana-operator chart deploys a Grafana Operator installation using a Kubernetes Deployment. The operator will extend the Kubernetes API with the following objects: Grafana, GrafanaDashboard and GrafanaDataSource. From that moment, the user will be able to deploy objects of these kinds and the previously deployed Operator will take care of deploying all the required Deployments, ConfigMaps and Services for running a Grafana instance. Its lifecycle is managed using kubectl on the Grafana, GrafanaDashboard and GrafanaDataSource objects.

Note: As the operator automatically deploys Grafana installations, the Grafana Operator pods will require a ServiceAccount with privileges to create and destroy multiple Kubernetes objects. This may be problematic for Kubernetes clusters with strict role-based access policies.

For more information, refer to the documentation on the differences between these charts, including more information on the differences in the deployment objects.

Specify each parameter using the --set key=value[,key=value] argument to helm install. For example,

$ helm install my-release \
  --set livenessProbe.successThreshold=5 \
    bitnami/grafana-operator

The above command sets the livenessProbe.successThreshold to 5.

Alternatively, a YAML file that specifies the values for the parameters can be provided while installing the chart. For example,

$ helm install my-release -f values.yaml bitnami/grafana-operator

It is strongly recommended to use immutable tags in a production environment. This ensures your deployment does not change automatically if the same tag is updated with a different image.

Bitnami will release a new chart updating its containers if a new version of the main container, significant changes, or critical vulnerabilities exist.

After the installation, create Dashboards under a CRD of your Kubernetes cluster.

For more details regarding what is possible with those CRDs please have a look at Working with Dashboards.

There are cases where you may want to deploy extra objects, such as custom Grafana, GrafanaDashboard or GrafanaDataSource objects. For covering this case, the chart allows adding the full specification of other objects using the extraDeploy parameter.

Refer to the documentation on deploying extra Grafana resources for an example of deploying a custom Grafana definition or to the tutorial on managing multiple Grafana instances and dashboards on Kubernetes with the Grafana Operator.

Find more information about how to deal with common errors related to Bitnami's Helm charts in this troubleshooting guide.

$ helm upgrade my-release bitnami/grafana-operator

In this version the CRDs get updated from v1beta to v1 stable API. It also updates the operator image to the new major v4.x.y release.

The values.yaml does not need changes when updating to this major version of the chart

• CRDs were updated to the latest Grafana Operator 4.0.x release artifacts:
  • The apiVersion of CRDs was updated from apiextensions.k8s.io/v1beta1 to apiextensions.k8s.io/v1.
  • Kubernetes 1.16 or higher is now required.

Some of the chart values were changed to adapt to the latest Bitnami standards. More specifically:

• operator.args was replaced with the standard value of overriding the container commands. The original operator.args contents were moved to operator.
• Several standard values were added such as sidecars, initContainers, extraEnvVars, amongst others.

No issues should be expected when upgrading.

In this version, the image block is defined once and is used in the different templates, while in the previous version, the image block was duplicated for the grafana container and the grafana plugin init one

image:
  registry: docker.io
  repository: bitnami/grafana
  tag: 7.5.10

VS

image:
  registry: docker.io
  repository: bitnami/grafana
  tag: 7.5.10
---
grafanaPluginInit:
  image:
    registry: docker.io
    repository: bitnami/grafana
    tag: 7.5.10

See PR#7114 for more info about the implemented changes

Copyright © 2022 Bitnami

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.