What is Grafana, and How to Deploy It in an Enterprise Data Stack?

Deployment Runbook

<aside>📌 Command-first runbook for customer deployment calls. Replace placeholders before running. For production environments, run changes through the customer-approved change process.

</aside>

Step 1 — Confirm cluster access

Run:

export KUBECONFIG=/path/to/customer-kubeconfig
export KUBE_CONTEXT=<customer-context>

kubectl --kubeconfig "$KUBECONFIG" --context "$KUBE_CONTEXT" config current-context
kubectl --kubeconfig "$KUBECONFIG" --context "$KUBE_CONTEXT" get nodes
kubectl --kubeconfig "$KUBECONFIG" --context "$KUBE_CONTEXT" get namespace monitoring || kubectl --kubeconfig "$KUBECONFIG" --context "$KUBE_CONTEXT" create namespace monitoring


Step 2 — Clone the Shakudo chart

Run:

git clone --depth=1 --branch <release-branch> <https://github.com/devsentient/monorepo.git> /tmp/monorepo
cd /tmp/monorepo/stack-components/grafana/helm
helm dependency update .


Step 3 — Create required secrets

Run:

kubectl --kubeconfig "$KUBECONFIG" --context "$KUBE_CONTEXT" create secret generic grafana-admin -n monitoring --from-literal=admin-user='admin' --from-literal=admin-password='<strong-password>'


Step 4 — Prepare values.yaml

Run:

cat > /tmp/grafana-values.yaml <<'EOF_VALUES'
grafana:
 admin:
   existingSecret: grafana-admin
 persistence:
   enabled: true
   size: 10Gi
 datasources:
   datasources.yaml:
     apiVersion: 1
     datasources:
       - name: Prometheus
         type: prometheus
         access: proxy
         url: <http://prometheus-server.monitoring.svc.cluster.local>
         isDefault: true
 dashboardProviders:
   dashboardproviders.yaml:
     apiVersion: 1
     providers:
       - name: default
         folder: Shakudo
         type: file
         options:
           path: /var/lib/grafana/dashboards/default
ingress:
 enabled: true
 host: grafana.<customer-domain>
EOF_VALUES


Step 5 — Deploy or upgrade

Run:

helm --kubeconfig "$KUBECONFIG" --kube-context "$KUBE_CONTEXT" upgrade --install grafana /tmp/monorepo/stack-components/grafana/helm \\
 --namespace monitoring \\
 --create-namespace \\
 --values /tmp/grafana-values.yaml \\
 --timeout 15m \\
 --wait


Step 6 — Validate Kubernetes resources

Run:

helm --kubeconfig "$KUBECONFIG" --kube-context "$KUBE_CONTEXT" status grafana -n monitoring
kubectl --kubeconfig "$KUBECONFIG" --context "$KUBE_CONTEXT" get pods,svc,pvc,ingress,virtualservice -n monitoring
kubectl --kubeconfig "$KUBECONFIG" --context "$KUBE_CONTEXT" get events -n monitoring --sort-by=.lastTimestamp | tail -n 60
kubectl --kubeconfig "$KUBECONFIG" --context "$KUBE_CONTEXT" logs -n monitoring -l app.kubernetes.io/instance=grafana --tail=100


Step 7 — Smoke test the service

Run:

kubectl --kubeconfig "$KUBECONFIG" --context "$KUBE_CONTEXT" port-forward -n monitoring svc/grafana 3000:80

# In another terminal:
curl <http://localhost:3000/api/health>


Rollback

Run:

helm --kubeconfig "$KUBECONFIG" --kube-context "$KUBE_CONTEXT" history grafana -n monitoring
helm --kubeconfig "$KUBECONFIG" --kube-context "$KUBE_CONTEXT" rollback grafana <REVISION> -n monitoring
kubectl --kubeconfig "$KUBECONFIG" --context "$KUBE_CONTEXT" rollout status deployment/grafana -n monitoring || true