Update Grafana via helm without losing all dashboards and data?

Grafana Configuration
1

Hello,

I’m aware this isn’t directly related to this project and more about helm charts configurations, but this seems like a proper place to ask.

Every time I do any modification to the values.yaml chart (for example changing grafana.ini, updating ingress rules, etc.), the pod get redeployed and all data (users/dashboards/datasources/etc) is deleted and lost. Even if the app version doesn’t change.

I’m using kube-prometheus-stack to install prometheus/grafana/alertmanager, but I assume it’s the same with other charts.

I see this ticket from 2018, but the same problem still exists in 2023. They changed the type to a StatefulSet but it didn’t resolve the issue.

Looking at my cluster PVC, I see one for prometheus and one for alertmanager, and they remain. But there’s none for Grafana.

Looking at it’s configuration, it seems to mount volumes called “sc-dashboard-volume” and “sc-datasources-volume” but they are mapped to “emptyDir”, so I guess that’s normal they get deleted when the pod get redeployed.

What’s the proper way to make them permanent?

2

These volumes aren’t it, “sc” stands for “sidecar” and is used by a mechanism to allow dynamic importing of dashboard via configmap with annotations. That’s great, but not what I’m looking for.

I just want users to be able to manually modify things via the web interface, and that they remain if the pod is restarted. Kinda weird it’s not the default behavior.

3

Ok, I think I got it.

I had to download the chart locally, and browse the grafana subchart templates up to the _pod.tpl file to find this section:

   {{- if and .Values.persistence.enabled (eq .Values.persistence.type "pvc") }}
   - name: storage
     persistentVolumeClaim:
       claimName: {{ tpl (.Values.persistence.existingClaim | default (include "grafana.fullname" .)) . }}

Which is in the grafana chart values.yaml, actually the standard helm structure for persistence.
And can be set in the kube-prometheus-chart by passing this snippet to its values.yaml:

grafana:
  persistence:
    enabled: true
    size: 500Mi

The part that confused me, is that browsing the kube-prometheus-stack default values via the artifacthub website, this section does not appear in the list.

Unlike Prometheus and AlertManager which appear, and are under a differently named category prometheus.prometheusSpec.storageSpec.volumeClaimTemplate.spec

I guess I still have learning to do to understand where I can find the list of values that exists in a chart to be modified.

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4

Ok - how to do this is on this page here : Deploy Grafana using Helm Charts | Grafana documentation

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