How to use Istio's dashboards in an existing Grafana

1

I am installing Istio on my cluster, but I want to use my existing Prometheus and Grafana installations. I used the Helm chart from istio-installer, and I am seeing some strange behavior.

  • I can install the dashboards–the helm install works.
  • If I install them to istio-system, my grafana can’t pick them up. If I install them to kube-system (where my prometheus is) Grafana can pick them up, but it can’t see any Istio metrics–the Istio Service Dashboard can’t read any of the namespaces on the cluster and none of my services show up in the menu.

What do I need to do to get these dashboards working in my existing Grafana?

2

If Grafana picks up the dashboards, that should be enough.

Did you assign the dashboards to pull from your Prometheus instance? This may be a case of needing to update the Data Source for the dashboards.

3

Hi, thanks for the reply! The key was that I had not created a rolebinding in the istio-system namespace, so the dashboards were there, but the data points weren’t.Once I added the rolebinding for Prometheus, it worked.