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Deploy on Kubernetes

Open source

Deploy Grafana Phlare using the Helm chart

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.

The Helm chart allows you to configure, install, and upgrade Grafana Phlare within a Kubernetes cluster.

Before you begin

The instructions that follow are common across any flavor of Kubernetes and assume that you know how to install, configure, and operate a Kubernetes cluster. And that you know how to use kubectl.

Caution: Do not use this getting started procedure in a production environment.

Hardware requirements:

A single Kubernetes node with a minimum of 4 cores and 16GiB RAM

Software requirements:

Kubernetes 1.20 or higher
The kubectl command for your version of Kubernetes
Helm 3 or higher

Verify that you have:

Access to the Kubernetes cluster
Persistent storage is enabled in the Kubernetes cluster, which has a default storage class set up. You can change the default StorageClass.
DNS service works in the Kubernetes cluster

Install the Helm chart in a custom namespace

Use a custom namespace so that you do not have to overwrite the default namespace later in the procedure.

Create a unique Kubernetes namespace, for example phlare-test:
```
kubectl create namespace phlare-test
```
For more details, see the Kubernetes documentation about Creating a new namespace.
Set up a Helm repository using the following commands:
```
helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update
```
Note: The Helm chart at https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts is a publication of the source code at grafana/phlare.

Install Grafana Phlare using the Helm chart using one of the following options:

Option A: Install Grafana Phlare as single binary

helm -n phlare-test install phlare grafana/phlare

Option B: Install Grafana Phlare as micro-services

# Gather the default config for micro-services
curl -LO values-micro-services.yaml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grafana/phlare/main/operations/phlare/helm/phlare/values-micro-services.yaml
helm -n phlare-test install phlare grafana/phlare --values values-micro-services.yaml

Note: The output of the command contains the query URLs necessary for the following steps, so for a micro-service setup it will look like this:

[...]
The in-cluster query URL is:
http://phlare-querier.phlare-test.svc.cluster.local.:4100
[...]

Check the statuses of the Phlare pods:

kubectl -n phlare-test get pods

The results look similar to this when you are in micro-services mode:

kubectl -n phlare-test get pods
NAME                                 READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
phlare-agent-7d75b4f9dc-xwpsw        1/1     Running   0          3m23s
phlare-distributor-7c474947c-2p5cc   1/1     Running   0          3m23s
phlare-distributor-7c474947c-xbszv   1/1     Running   0          3m23s
phlare-ingester-0                    1/1     Running   0          5s
phlare-ingester-1                    1/1     Running   0          37s
phlare-ingester-2                    1/1     Running   0          69s
phlare-minio-0                       1/1     Running   0          3m23s
phlare-querier-66bf58dfcc-89gb8      1/1     Running   0          3m23s
phlare-querier-66bf58dfcc-p7lnc      1/1     Running   0          3m23s
phlare-querier-66bf58dfcc-zbggm      1/1     Running   0          3m23s

Wait until all of the pods have a status of Running or Completed, which might take a few minutes.

Query profiles in Grafana

Install Grafana in the same Kubernetes cluster where you installed Phlare.

helm upgrade -n phlare-test --install grafana grafana/grafana \
  --set image.repository=grafana/grafana \
  --set image.tag=main \
  --set env.GF_FEATURE_TOGGLES_ENABLE=flameGraph \
  --set env.GF_AUTH_ANONYMOUS_ENABLED=true \
  --set env.GF_AUTH_ANONYMOUS_ORG_ROLE=Admin \
  --set env.GF_DIAGNOSTICS_PROFILING_ENABLED=true \
  --set env.GF_DIAGNOSTICS_PROFILING_ADDR=0.0.0.0 \
  --set env.GF_DIAGNOSTICS_PROFILING_PORT=6060 \
  --set-string 'podAnnotations.phlare\.grafana\.com/scrape=true' \
  --set-string 'podAnnotations.phlare\.grafana\.com/port=6060'

For details, see Deploy Grafana on Kubernetes.

Port-forward Grafana to localhost, by using the kubectl command:

kubectl port-forward -n phlare-test service/grafana 3000:80

In a browser, go to the Grafana server at http://localhost:3000.
On the left-hand side, go to Configuration > Data sources.
Configure a new Grafana Phlare data source to query the Grafana Phlare server, by using the following settings:
Field Value
Name Phlare
URL http://phlare-querier.phlare-test.svc.cluster.local.:4100/
To add a data source, see Add a data source.
Verify success:
You should be able to query profiles in Grafana Explore, as well as create dashboard panels by using your newly configured Phlare data source.

Field	Value
Name	Phlare
URL	http://phlare-querier.phlare-test.svc.cluster.local.:4100/

Optional: Persistently add data source:

The deployment of Grafana has no persistent database, so it will not retain settings like the data source configuration across restarts.

To ensure the data source gets provisioned at start-up, create the following datasources.yaml file:

datasources:
  phlare.yaml:
   apiVersion: 1
   datasources:
   - name: Phlare
     type: phlare
     uid: phlare-test
     url: http://phlare-querier.phlare-test.svc.cluster.local.:4100/

Modify the Helm deployment by running:

   helm upgrade -n phlare-test --reuse-values grafana grafana/grafana \
     --values datasources.yaml

Optional: Scrape your own workload’s profiles

The Phlare chart uses a default configuration that causes its agent to scrape Pods, provided they have the correct annotations. This functionality uses relabel_config and kubernetes_sd_config that might be familar from the Prometheus or Grafna Agent config.

In order to get Phlare to scrape pods, you must add the following annotations to the the pods:

metadata:
  annotations:
    phlare.grafana.com/scrape: "true"
    phlare.grafana.com/port: "8080"

phlare.grafana.com/port should be set to the port that your pod serves the /debug/pprof/ endpoints from. Note that the values for phlare.grafana.io/scrape and phlare.grafana.io/port must be enclosed in double quotes to ensure it is represented as a string.

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