How to access Grafana dashboards

Guide explaining how to get access to the data collected and stored by the Observability Platform.

Giant Swarm provides an Observability Platform in each installation, based on Grafana Mimir for metrics, and Grafana Loki for logs, collecting data from the system and apps managed by Giant Swarm, as well as any source of data you configure according to the data ingestion tutorial.

These metrics and logs are available to be explored in your Grafana instance on the installation.

We aim to provide a useful set of dashboards for you to quickly explore all observability data relevant to you, giving you access to the same information that we use for operations, support, and billing.

Accessing dashboards

The address for your installation’s grafana instance is composed of the base domain plus the grafana subdomain.

If you don’t know the base domain for your installation, you can ask your Giant Swarm support contact for the address.

Authentication and authorization

Access to grafana is controlled via single sign-on (SSO), using the same identity provider you use for the platform API.

In order to access Grafana as a customer, you must be a member of the admin group. Specifically, that’s a group in your identity provider selected to specify which users have admin permissions in the Giant Swarm installation.

Note: If you don’t have single sign-on (SSO) configured yet or have any questions regarding the admin group, please contact your Account engineer.

Once you open the Grafana address for your installation, you will be able to login via the Giant Swarm SSO. The screenshot below shows an example.

There is one identity provider configured for Giant Swarm staff and one for you as a customer admin. Depending on the type of identity provider used for you as a customer, the label for the button to click can look slightly different.

After selecting the right identity provider, you may run through an authentication workflow. However, if you are already authenticated within the current browser, this will be skipped and you should see the Home dashboard as a result.

When you first log in, you’ll see the Shared Org selected by default. This organization contains curated dashboards and system metrics that are accessible to everyone with Grafana access.

Learn more about these default organizations and how to create your own in our multi-tenancy documentation.