Set up and access Grafana

Gloo Platform provides two Grafana dashboards that you can use to monitor your environment.

• Operations dashboard: Use this dashboard to monitor the health of your Gloo Platform environment, such as the average translation and reconciliation time for the Gloo management server, or translation errors that occured. When you install a Gloo product, the built-in Prometheus server is configured with default alerts that are automatically populated into the operations dashboard when they occur.
• Cilium dashboard: If your cluster uses the Cilium CNI such as when you installed Gloo Network, you can use the Cilium dashboard to monitor the health of the Cilium agent, Cilium operator, and Hubble. Note that Cilium metrics that are related to the Cilium service mesh are not included in this dashboard.

To access a pre-built Grafana dashboard, you must have Grafana installed in your cluster. You can easily do this by installing the Prometheus community Helm chart as shown in the steps on this page. However, if you have an existing Grafana instance that runs in your cluster already, you can import any of the Gloo Platform dashboard to your Grafana instance. To do that, simply skip this guide and follow the instructions to import the operations or Cilium

1. Install the Prometheus community Helm chart. This Helm chart automatically sets up Grafana in your cluster.

   helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
   helm repo update
   
   helm upgrade --install kube-prometheus-stack \
   prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack \
   --version 30.0.1 \
   --namespace monitoring \
   --create-namespace \
   --values - <<EOF
   grafana:
     additionalDataSources:
     - name: prometheus-gloo-platform
       type: prometheus
       url: http://prometheus-server.gloo-mesh:80
   EOF
   

2. Verify that the pods are all up and running.

   kubectl get pods -n monitoring
   

   Example output:

   NAME                                                        READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
   alertmanager-kube-prometheus-stack-alertmanager-0           2/2     Running   0          5m18s
   kube-prometheus-stack-grafana-5d9f6d4ffd-gz9rn              3/3     Running   0          5m23s
   kube-prometheus-stack-kube-state-metrics-596b9c6b55-jk8s9   1/1     Running   0          5m23s
   kube-prometheus-stack-operator-7bb8679c95-bwfw5             1/1     Running   0          5m23s
   kube-prometheus-stack-prometheus-node-exporter-9qdgv        1/1     Running   0          5m24s
   kube-prometheus-stack-prometheus-node-exporter-dks8k        1/1     Running   0          5m24s
   kube-prometheus-stack-prometheus-node-exporter-z5p5z        1/1     Running   0          5m24s
   prometheus-kube-prometheus-stack-prometheus-0               2/2     Running   0          5m17s
   

3. Set up port forwarding on your local machine to access the Grafana dashboard.

   kubectl port-forward $(kubectl get pods -n monitoring -o name | grep grafana) 8080:3000 -n monitoring
   

4. Open the Grafana dashboard in your web browser.

5. Log in to the Grafana dashboard with admin as the username, and prom-operator as the password. These are the default credentials that are set by the Prometheus community chart. You can change these credentials when you log in to Grafana.