You can install Grafana in various ways, like using the Grafana official Helm chart, or the Grafana Operator. Hosted solutions are also available, like Grafana Cloud.

The file grafana/values.yaml provides a default Helm config for the Grafana official Helm chart, which pulls the Linkerd dashboards published at https://grafana.com/orgs/linkerd/dashboards.

You can install the chart like this:

helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm install grafana -n grafana --create-namespace grafana/grafana \
  -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/linkerd/linkerd2/main/grafana/values.yaml

Please make sure to update the entries in grafana/values.yaml before using the file; in particular:

• auth and log settings under grafana.ini
• datasources.datasources.yaml.datasources[0].url should point to your Prometheus service

The other installation methods can easily import those same dashboards using their IDs, as listed in grafana/values.yaml.

In order to have the Linkerd Viz Dashboard show the Grafana icon there where relevant, and have it link to the appropriate Grafana dashboard, make sure you have a proper location set up in the grafana.url setting in Linkerd Viz's values.yaml.

The grafana/dashboards directory contains the same dashboard definitions published under https://grafana.com/orgs/linkerd. Please keep them in sync when making any changes. After logging into grafana.com (using the linkerd account), the dashboards can be managed under Org Settings -> My Dashboards.