Run PMM with external grafana

[wsilva]

Description

We already have Grafana running in Kubernetes cluster with horizontal auto scale feature enabled so Grafana pods can increase or decrease the amount of replicas based on usage. These Grafana pods are pointing to external postgres database running as a service in AWS RDS.

Is there a way to run PMM separated from Grafana?

Suggested solution

I was thinking in a feature flag based on environments variables like describe in HA document:

Ex.:

• For external postgres: PG_EXTERNAL_DB = true | false, PG_HOST = external.postgres.local, PG_USER = pg-username, PG_PASSWORD = some-random-p4ssw0rd
• For external grafana: GF_EXTERNAL = true | false
• For external victoria metrics: VM_EXTERNAL = true | false, VM_HOST = external.victoria-metrics.local
• And so on ...

In the running Grafana we can install or copy plugins and import PMM dashboards before running the PMM pod for the first time.

In the PMM pod we can set autostart = false inside the *.ini (/etc/supervisord.d/grafana.ini, /etc/supervisord.d/pmm.ini, ...) supervisord files according to the service we are running separatedly (postgres, clickhouse, victoria metrics, ...).

We can also set any config file based on the same environment variables to point to external services.

Any suggestion are welcome.

Additional context

I was taking a look at the HA doc and I recommend to change the usage of ip addresses to FQDN from each external service to avoid the necessity of fetch new ip addresses, change config files and restart PMM in each change. This way we can run it inside a kubernetes cluster.

Code of Conduct

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[BupycHuk]

Hi, since PMM UI is coupled with custom changes in grafana we made it's not easy thing to do. But we are working on decoupling PMM codebase from grafana. it will take a long time before we will be ready to use external grafana. Meanwhile you can use that external VictoriaMetrics as datasource for your grafana and import all dashboards. unfortunately QAN and other features won't work with external grafana yet.

[wsilva]

Thanks for the quick reply @BupycHuk.

Is the coupling done by the /srv folder?
If yes, I was thinking of an NFS storage for this folder and we can share it between PMM pods and Grafana pods. What do you think?

Kind Regards

[BupycHuk]

No, we've made a lot of changes in Grafana codebase. You can use the same PostgreSQL database for both PMM and Grafana, in that case all dashboards and plugins installed by PMM will be visible in Grafana

[wsilva]

Thanks for the update.
If there are anything we can help, ou any update decoupling Grafana from PMM please let us know.
🙇