grafana-dashboard interface is missing so no dashboard out of the box

[Nobuto Murata]

Thanks to the following commit, we can scrape metrics of Ceph from ceph-mon units directly into Prometheus.
https://opendev.org/openstack/charm-ceph-mon/commit/425c078299b6e177fc160ab44c55ca814c92dc75

However, there is no dashboard defined in the charm so Grafana is still empty and users have to set it up by creating an own dashboard or importing from somewhere.

It would be nice if the charm has a grafana-dashboard interface defined, and inject the definitions of dashboards to Grafana out of the box. The procedure is available at:
https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/mgr/dashboard/#manual-installation-and-configuration

The definitions of dashboards can be found in:
https://github.com/ceph/ceph/tree/master/monitoring/grafana/dashboards
or
https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards?search=ceph&orderBy=downloads&direction=desc

[Drew Freiberger (afreiberger)]

As a short-term solution, you can download those dashboards you've referenced and loop through them using the import-dashboard action on grafana:

for dashboard in *.json; do
    juju run-action --wait grafana/0 import-dashboard dashboard="$(base64 $dashboard)"
done

[Nobuto Murata (nobuto)]

From the upstream README of the dashboard dir:
> Bare in mind that the osd device details dashboard needs node_exporter active - all the other dashboards pick data out of ceph-mgr based metrics.

So many graphs will be empty out of the box with the charmed deployment since we don't have node_exporter enabled, but with telegraf.

[Nobuto Murata (nobuto)]

Also worth noting that this spec for Ceph dashboard may bring Embedded Grafana Dashboards in the Ceph dashboard itself, not external Grafana instance.
https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/charm-specs/+/794561

[Drew Freiberger (afreiberger)]

The ceph dashboards were added as a relation to the ceph-dashboard charm, and are available if you relate ceph-dashboard -> grafana:dashboards. Unfortunately, some sites may not be appropriate to run the ceph-dashboard interface for management and visualization of data. There's both questions of security/RBAC as well as the dashboard providing links to upstream documentation/software that may not be appropriate for juju-based installations of ceph.

Would it be possible to add the dashboards and interface also to the ceph-mon charm so that in those instances, we don't have to run ceph-dashboard units?

The theory would be that grafana could provide ceph metrics visualization with two relations:
ceph-mon:prometheus -> prometheus:target
ceph-mon:dashboards -> grafana:dashboards

This would allow to skip the tech-preview charm and it's functionality and attack surfaces while still providing the same dashboard experience in grafana which was available when using the deprecated prometheus-ceph-exporter charm.