Grafana Phlare Deploy on Kubernetes Deploy with Jsonnet and Tanka

Deploy Grafana Phlare with Jsonnet and Tanka

In March 2023, Grafana Labs acquired Pyroscope, the company behind the eponymous open source continuous profiling project. As a result, the Pyroscope and Grafana Phlare projects will be merged under the new name Grafana Pyroscope. To learn more, read our recent blog post about the news.

Grafana Labs publishes a Jsonnet library that you can use to deploy Grafana Phlare. The Jsonnet files are located in the Phlare repository and are using the helm charts as a source.

Install tools and deploy the first cluster

You can use Tanka and jsonnet-bundler to generate Kubernetes YAML manifests from the jsonnet files.

1. Install tanka and jb:

   Follow the steps at https://tanka.dev/install. If you have go installed locally you can also use:

   # make sure to be outside of GOPATH or a go.mod project
   go install github.com/grafana/tanka/cmd/tk@latest
   go install github.com/jsonnet-bundler/jsonnet-bundler/cmd/jb@latest
   

2. Set up a Jsonnet project, based on the example that follows:

   • Initialize Tanka
   • Install Grafana Phlare and Kubernetes Jsonnet libraries
   • Set up an environment

   # Initialize a Tanka directory
   mkdir jsonnet-example && cd jsonnet-example
   tk init --k8s=1.21
   
   # Install Phlare jsonnet
   jb install github.com/grafana/phlare/operations/phlare@main
   
   # Install required tanka-util
   jb install github.com/grafana/jsonnet-libs/tanka-util@master
   
   # Setup your current cluster as the server for the default environment
   tk env set environments/default --server-from-context=$(kubectl config current-context)
   

3. Decide if you want to run Grafana Phlare in the monolithic or the micro-services mode

• Option A) For monolithic mode the file environments/default/main.jsonnet, should look like;

  local phlare = import 'phlare/jsonnet/phlare/phlare.libsonnet';
  local tk = import 'tk';
  
  phlare.new(overrides={
    namespace: tk.env.spec.namespace,
  })
  

• Option B) For micro services mode the file environments/default/main.jsonnet, should look like;

  local phlare = import 'phlare/jsonnet/phlare/phlare.libsonnet';
  local valuesMicroServices = import 'phlare/jsonnet/values-micro-services.json';
  local tk = import 'tk';
  
  phlare.new(overrides={
    namespace: tk.env.spec.namespace,
    values+: valuesMicroServices,
  })
  

1. Generate the Kubernetes YAML manifests and store them in the ./manifests directory:

   # Take a look at the generated YAML manifests.
   tk show environments/default
   
   # Export the YAML manifests to the folder `./manifests`:
   tk export ./manifests environments/default
   

2. Deploy the manifests to a Kubernetes cluster, in one of two ways:

   • Use the tk apply command.

     Tanka supports commands to show the diff and apply changes to a Kubernetes cluster:

     # Show the difference between your Jsonnet definition and your Kubernetes cluster:
     tk diff environments/default
     
     # Apply changes to your Kubernetes cluster:
     tk apply environments/default
     

   • Use the kubectl apply command.

     You generated the Kubernetes manifests and stored them in the ./manifests directory in the previous step.

     You can run the following command to directly apply these manifests to your Kubernetes cluster:

     # Review the changes that will apply to your Kubernetes cluster:
     kubectl apply --dry-run=client -k manifests/
     
     # Apply the changes to your Kubernetes cluster:
     kubectl apply -k manifests/
     

   Note: The generated Kubernetes manifests create resources in the default namespace. To use a different namespace, change the namespace configuration option in the environments/default/main.jsonnet file, and re-generate the Kubernetes manifests.