How to set up Custom Grafana

OpenShift comes with Grafana by default, however, it is read-only, and thus you can't do custom queries and create custom dashboard for your particular needs. For clusters on x86, you can refer to this Red Hat blog. Sadly, there is no images available (at this time) for ppc64le, and thus the blog doesn't work. This page describes how to overcome that for an OCP 4.x clusters running on Power/ppc64le, by leveraging operator images that IBM Cloud Pak utilizes, verified with OCP 4.7.4 in April, 2021.

Disclaimer: IBM does not provide support for the public images that are used outside Cloud Pak context.

Prerequisites

  • Healthy OCP 4.x cluster with no cluster operators degraded or not available
  • CRI-O on all cluster nodes can pull images from Internet (ie. cluster-wide proxy)

Instructions

This is a boiled-down version that would get you a customizable Grafana instance running on your cluster with All this is based on, if you are curious or need more details, the IBM Knowledge Center articles at the bottom;

  1. oc create -f cs-catsrc.yaml (below "YAML" section)

    YAML 
        apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1alpha1
    kind: CatalogSource
    metadata:
      name: opencloud-operators
      namespace: openshift-marketplace
    spec:
      displayName: IBMCS Operators
      publisher: IBM
      sourceType: grpc
      image: docker.io/ibmcom/ibm-common-service-catalog:latest
      updateStrategy:
        registryPoll:
          interval: 45m
    (This was taken from "2. Installing the IBM Cloud Pak fundational services operator" from [this page](https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSHKN6/installer/3.x.x/install_operator.html).)

  2. make sure oc -n openshift-marketplace get pod | grep opencloud-operators shows "Running"

  3. oc create -f cs-subs.yaml (below "YAML" section)

    YAML 
          apiVersion: v1
      kind: Namespace
      metadata:
        name: common-service
      ---
      apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1alpha2
      kind: OperatorGroup
      metadata:
        name: operatorgroup
        namespace: common-service
      spec:
        targetNamespaces:
        - common-service
      ---
      apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1alpha1
      kind: Subscription
      metadata:
        name: ibm-common-service-operator
        namespace: common-service
      spec:
        channel: v3
        installPlanApproval: Automatic
        name: ibm-common-service-operator
        source: opencloud-operators
        sourceNamespace: openshift-marketplace"
    (This was compiled to do the "Common Services" operator on OperatorHub GUI as intructed in "2. Installing the IBM Cloud Pak fundational services operator" from [this page](https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSHKN6/installer/3.x.x/install_operator.html). You can definitely do the manual install on Web Console, if you so prefer.)

  4. oc edit commonservices common-service -n ibm-common-services and replace spec: stanza with contents below;

    YAML snippet 
          spec:
        manualManagement: true
        services:
        - name: ibm-monitoring-grafana-operator
          spec:
            grafana:
              dashboardConfig:
                resources:
                  limits:
                    cpu: 70m
                    memory: 170Mi
                  requests:
                    cpu: 25m
                    memory: 140Mi
              datasourceConfig:
                type: openshift
              grafanaConfig:
                resources:
                  limits:
                    cpu: 150m
                    memory: 230Mi
                  requests:
                    cpu: 25m
                    memory: 200Mi
              isHub: false
              routerConfig:
                resources:
                  limits:
                    cpu: 70m
                    memory: 80Mi
                  requests:
                    cpu: 25m
                    memory: 65Mi
        size: medium
    (This was culled and put together from [this page](https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSHKN6/installer/3.x.x/custom_resource.html) for Grafana.)

  5. oc apply -f cs-grafana.yaml (below "YAML" section)

    YAML 
         apiVersion: operator.ibm.com/v1alpha1
     kind: OperandRequest
     metadata:
       name: common-service
       namespace: ibm-common-services
     spec:
       requests:
         - operands:
             - name: ibm-monitoring-grafana-operator
           registry: common-service
    (This is what's needed for Grafana, based on all the stuff described in [this page](https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSHKN6/monitoring/1.x.x/monitoring_service.html#install_monitsrv).)

  6. give it some time (half an hour?) to get all the necessary pods up and running: oc get pod -n ibm-common-services

References