Deploying Grafana on Openshift 4

OpenShift users want access to a Grafana interface in order to build custom dashboards for their cluster and application workloads. The Grafana that shipped with OpenShift was read-only and has been deprecated in OpenShift 4.11 and removed in OpenShift 4.12 .

Since OpenShift uses Prometheus for both Cluster and User Workload metrics, its fairly straight forward to deploy a Grafana instance using the Grafana Operator and then view those cluster metrics and create custom Dashboards.

Grafana Operator

1. Create a namespace for the Grafana Operator to be installed in

2. Deploy the Grafana Operator

3. Wait for the Operator to be ready

Deploy Grafana

1. Add the Managed OpenShift Black Belt helm repo

2. Deploy Grafana

Create Prometheus DataSource

1. Give the Grafana service account the cluster-monitoring-view role

2. Get a bearer token for the grafana service account

3. Deploy the prometheus data source

4. Deploy a Dashboard

5. Get the URL for Grafana

6. Browse to the URL from above, log in via your OCP credentials

7. Click Dashboards -> Manage -> grafana-operator -> Cluster Metrics