Creating custom Grafana dashboards

Guide explaining how to manage custom Grafana dashboards in the Observability Platform.

You can find in your installations Grafana a set of out-of-the-box dashboards provided by Giant Swarm. However these default dashboards might not satisfy your specific observability requirements or your apps or clusters unique context. This is why the Observability Platform allows you to create your own dashboards in self-service.

Creating your own dashboard

To create your own dashboard, you can create a configmap resource in the management cluster in any namespace you want containing the dashboard. For example:

apiVersion: v1
data:
  my-dashboard.json: |-
    { ... my dashboard in json format }    
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  annotations:
    ## Define the directory in grafana where the dashboard will be added to the grafana container
    k8s-sidecar-target-directory: /var/lib/grafana/dashboards/customer
  labels:
    ## Tell grafana to load this configmap as a dashboard
    app.giantswarm.io/kind: dashboard
  name: my-grafana-dashboard
  namespace: my-namespace

Limitations

Beware that the dashboard name must be unique so don’t override one of your own.