fleet-dashboards

This is the home of the Fleet Grafana dashboards. From here, they are added to the Fleet chart. The dashboards are generated using Jsonnet, a configuration language for app and tool developers, and the Grafonnet library, which simplifies the creation of Grafana dashboards. Jsonnet allows for modular and reusable configurations, while Grafonnet provides a library to define Grafana dashboards in Jsonnet. Read more about Jsonnet on jsonnet.org and about Grafonnet on grafana.github.io/grafonnet.

Generating Dashboards

Requirements

• Jsonnet (Go implementation)
• Grafonnet
• Go (for the installation of the dependencies using go install)

Installing Jsonnet and Dependencies

If you have Go, you can install Jsonnet, jsonnet-linter, jsonnet-bundler and the Grafonnet library using the following command:

make deps

This will use go install to install the dependencies in your $GOPATH/bin/ directory. Make sure that this directory is in your PATH.

It will also use jsonnet-bundler to install the Grafonnet library in the vendor/ directory of this repository.

If you feel uncomfortable using go install, you can install the dependencies with the method that is comfortable for you.

Generating the Dashboards

To generate the dashboards, run the command below. The dashboards will be created in the directory out/.

make

Setting up a development environment with Fleet and Rancher

First install all the requirements.

make deps

This command will install jsonnet, the jsonnet-linter and jsonnet-bundler using go install. jsonnet-bundler is used to manage the dependencies of the Jsonnet files. In our case, the only dependency is the Grafonnet library.

Once the dependencies are installed, you can run the following command to setup a local development environment with Rancher and Fleet. Note that the scripts mentioned here can be found in the rancher/fleet repository, not in the fleet-dashboards repository.

dev/setup-k3ds && dev/setup-k3ds-downstream && dev/setup-rancher-clusters

Make sure the installation of the rancher helm chart doesn't time out. Subsequent commands might fail due to that.

If that was successful, you may want to upgrade fleet in Rancher to the local dev version, especially if you require fleet to expose metrics that are not yet in a released Fleet version but in your local repository. Otherwise you can safely skip this step.

dev/build-fleet && dev/update-fleet-in-rancher-k3d dev

The last step is to install the rancher-monitoring chart in the local cluster using the Rancher UI. You can find it in Apps -> Charts in the menu of the local cluster. The card saying Monitoring is the rancher-monitoring chart that needs to be installed. Afterwards use the Rancher UI to access Grafana and Prometheus. The Rancher UI provides links to those services in the Monitoring menu item.

Debugging Dashboards

For quickly iterating between generating the dashboards and seeing the results in the Grafana instance installed by the rancher-monitoring chart, the Makefile of this repository contains a few quite useful targets.

• build-dashboards

  Iterates all jsonnet files in the dashboards/ directory and generates the dashboards in the out/ directory. This is the same as running make in the root of the repository.

• build-configmap

  Uses kubectl to create a configmap with the dashboards in the out/ directory.

• patch-configmap

  Patches the generated configmap with the dashboards in the out/ directory so that when the configmap is applied, Grafana is updated with the dashboards.

• configmap-apply

  Builds, patches and applies the configmap to the cluster.

• debug

  Runs build-dashboards followed by configmap to do all the steps from generating the dashboards and configmap over patching and applying to the cluster.

You can run any of these targets with make <target>.