Using Grafana with Linkerd

You can install Grafana in various ways, like using the Grafana official Helm chart, or the Grafana Operator. Hosted solutions are also available, like Grafana Cloud.

The file grafana/values.yaml provides a default Helm config for the Grafana official Helm chart, which pulls the Linkerd dashboards published at https://grafana.com/orgs/linkerd/dashboards.

You can install the chart like this:

helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm install grafana -n grafana --create-namespace grafana/grafana \
  -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/linkerd/linkerd2/main/grafana/values.yaml

Please make sure to update the entries in grafana/values.yaml before using the file; in particular:

• auth and log settings under grafana.ini
• datasources.datasources.yaml.datasources[0].url should point to your Prometheus service

The other installation methods can easily import those same dashboards using their IDs, as listed in grafana/values.yaml.

In order to have the Linkerd Viz Dashboard show the Grafana icon there where relevant, and have it link to the appropriate Grafana dashboard, make sure you have a proper location set up in the grafana.url setting in Linkerd Viz's values.yaml.

Granting access

As of linkerd stable-2.13.0 (or edge-23.1.1), the access to Linkerd Viz' Prometheus instance has been restricted through the prometheus-admin AuthorizationPolicy, granting access only to the metrics-api ServiceAccount. In order to grant access to Grafana, you need to add an AuthorizationPolicy pointing to its ServiceAccount. You can apply authzpolicy-grafana.yaml which grants permission for the grafana ServiceAccount.

Note to developers

The grafana/dashboards directory contains the same dashboard definitions published under https://grafana.com/orgs/linkerd. Please keep them in sync when making any changes. After logging into grafana.com (using the linkerd account), the dashboards can be managed under Org Settings -> My Dashboards.