How to import custom dashboards to grafana using helm

Question

I'm trying to understand helm and I wonder if someone could ELI5 to me something or help me with something.

So i did run below:

helm repo add coreos https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/coreos-charts/stable/

Then I installed kube-prometheus by using below:

helm install coreos/kube-prometheus --name kube-prometheus -f values.yaml --namespace monitoringtest

Everything works fine but I'm trying to add some custom dashboards from json files and I'm struggling to understand how to do it.

I was following this: https://blogcodevalue.wordpress.com/2018/09/16/automate-grafana-dashboard-import-process/

In my values.yaml I added below

serverDashboardConfigmaps:
  - example-dashboards

I understand that if I do:

helm upgrade --install kube-prometheus -f values.yaml --namespace monitoringtest coreos/kube-prometheus

That should cause grafana to pickup a below configmap called example-dashboards and load *.json files from custom-dashboards folder.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: example-dashboards
data:
{{ (.Files.Glob "custom-dashboards/*.json").AsConfig | indent 2 }}

# Or
# 
# data:
#   custom-dashboard.json: |-
# {{ (.Files.Get "custom.json") | indent 4 }}
#
# The filename (and consequently the key under data) must be in the format `xxx-dashboard.json` or `xxx-datasource.json`
# for them to be picked up.

Now two questions:

How do I add above configmap to this helm release?

Where is this custom-dashboards folder located? Is it on my laptop and then is send to grafana?

Do I need to copy all of https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/coreos-charts/stable/ onto my laptop?

Sorry for explaining everything but I'm just trying to understand this.

Answer 1

In the latest version of kube-prometheus-stack chart in 2021, According to this answer on github, You should just create a configmap with dashboard data and right labels and it will be checked by sidecar in grafana pod.

Example:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: grafana-dashboards-custom-1
  namespace: monitoring
  labels:
     grafana_dashboard: "1"
     prometheus: my-value
     release: prometheus

data:
  app-status.json: |-
    {
    "annotations": {
        "list": [
        {

prometheus: my-value comes from this helm chart value:

prometheus:
  prometheusSpec:
    serviceMonitorSelector:
      matchLabels:
        prometheus: my-value

Answer 2

You can find a good example of how to do this in the charts for prometheus-operator here:

https://github.com/helm/charts/tree/master/stable/prometheus-operator/templates/grafana

It is a ConfigMapList that gets all JSONs from a given directory and stores them into ConfigMaps which are read by Grafana.

{{- $files := .Files.Glob "dashboards/*.json" }}
{{- if $files }}
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMapList
items:
{{- range $path, $fileContents := $files }}
{{- $dashboardName := regexReplaceAll "(^.*/)(.*)\\.json$" $path "${2}" }}
- apiVersion: v1
  kind: ConfigMap
  metadata:
    name: {{ printf "%s-%s" (include "prometheus-operator.fullname" $) $dashboardName | trunc 63 | trimSuffix "-" }}
    namespace: {{ template "prometheus-operator.namespace" . }}
    labels:
      {{- if $.Values.grafana.sidecar.dashboards.label }}
      {{ $.Values.grafana.sidecar.dashboards.label }}: "1"
      {{- end }}
      app: {{ template "prometheus-operator.name" $ }}-grafana
{{ include "prometheus-operator.labels" $ | indent 6 }}
  data:
    {{ $dashboardName }}.json: {{ $.Files.Get $path | toJson }}
{{- end }}
{{- end }}

Mind that the size of a ConfigMap might be limited: https://stackoverflow.com/a/53015758/4252480