Visualizing metrics with Grafana

A user can access metrics on pre-built Dashboards in Grafana and use them for ad hoc reporting.

About Grafana

Grafana provides browser-based dashboards.

Visit the Grafana website for more information.

Opening Grafana

Grafana is deployed by default.

Assuming the command minikube ip returned 192.168.39.39, the console is available on http://grafana.192.168.39.39.nip.io.

minikube’s IP address changes every time the minikube instance is re-created.
grafana

Adding custom dashboards

Login to Grafana with the username admin and the password keycloak or the password relevant to your deployment when anonymous login is not sufficient.

Custom dashboards are included in folder monitoring/dashboards. Add more dashboards there as new files, and task installs the latest versions in the minikube cluster.

Taking dashboard snapshots

Once logged in to Grafana with the username admin and the password relevant to the deployment, the user would have the ability to take snapshots of the dashboards and export the snapshots as a json file to be able to import them into a standalone Grafana instance to view and interact with the dashboard.

You can read on more on how to take the snapshot and other ways to share a dashboard here.

Automated dashboard PDF downloads

We have a python script snapGrafana.py which allows us to take the PDF snapshots of the available dashboards for a given time window, Grafana instance, Kubernetes namespace.

Installing needed python libraries

pip3 install -U -r requirements.txt

And we can check if all the requirements are satisfied using the below command.

python3 -m pip check
The playwright python module that’s imported needs additional installation using the command playwright install if not we would see a exception similar to this. 
if you see a missing playwright._impl._api_types.Error: Executable doesn't exist at  exception, just run the below command to download the needed browsers for the script to work.

Usage

Once the requirements for the script are satisfied, you can use it with the below command and the dashboard pdf’s are downloaded to the current directory where you are executing this script from.

python3 snapGrafana.py --grafana_domain ${GRAFANA_DOMAIN} \
--admin_password ${KEYCLOAK_MASTER_PASSWORD} \
--time_window "from=1694801561166&to=1694802033424" \
--keycloak_namespace "runner-keycloak"

snapGrafana.py cli options

CLI option Default Notes

--grafana_domain

(not set)

The domain of the Grafana server without the http://.

example: --grafana_domain grafana.apps.gh-keycloak.abcd.xx.openshiftapps.com

--admin_password

(not set)

This is the Grafana Admin user password, if you use minikube deployment its admin and if you use openshift its what is set for KEYCLOAK_MASTER_PASSWORD

--keycloak_namespace

runner-keycloak

The namespace in which the target Keycloak is deployed, this is used by the grafana dashboards to filter.

--time_window

(not set)

The time window used by the dashboard to filter the scope of the dashboard.

When using the Ansible module’s benchmark.sh script, you will find a message like the below at the end of the playbook run.

INFO: Input for snapGrafana.py is from=1695382925487&to=1695383025382

When using kcb.sh directly, user can get this value from the result_grafana_inputs.json file generated after the kcb.sh based load simulations and can be found in the keycloak-benchmark-0.XX-SNAPSHOT/results/ directory. Below is an example output of the result_grafana_inputs.json file and the needed time window value is associated with the snap_grafana_time_window key.

{
  "uuid": "108fdd0c-41b7-41d5-af66-8a41cff19a8f",
  "name": "Scenario 'keycloak.scenario.authentication.AuthorizationCode' with 2 users-per-sec",
  "grafana_input": {
    "start": {
      "epoch_seconds": 1695213772,
      "iso": "2023-09-20T08:42:52-04:00"
    },
    "end": {
      "epoch_seconds": 1695213810,
      "iso": "2023-09-20T08:43:30-04:00"
    },
    "input": {
      "scenario": "keycloak.scenario.authentication.AuthorizationCode",
      "snap_grafana_time_window": "from=1695213772731&to=1695213810554",
      "unit": "users-per-sec",
      "value": 2,
      "config": "-Drealm-name=test-realm"
    }
  }
}