Kube-prometheus: Panel plugin not found: grafana-piechart-panel

[johscheuer]

What happened?

I did a fresh installation on a fresh Kubernetes cluster (1.15.5) and I get the following error in the kubernetes-networking-cluster dashboard:

Panel plugin not found: grafana-piechart-panel

It seems like the plugin is missing a simple InitContainer with the grafana-cli plugins install grafana-piechart-panel command solves this issue:

      initContainers:
      - image: grafana/grafana:6.4.3
        name: grafana-init
        command:
        - bash
        - -c
        - grafana-cli plugins install grafana-piechart-panel
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /var/lib/grafana
          name: grafana-storage
          readOnly: false

Did you expect to see some different?

I expected that Grafana has all required plugins :)

How to reproduce it (as minimally and precisely as possible):

Just use the current master and apply the changes:

ce5fe79 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) Merge pull request #299 from coreos/fix-jb

Environment

Kubernetes with kubeadm

• Prometheus Operator version:

  Insert image tag or Git SHA here
  version: quay.io/coreos/prometheus-operator:v0.34.0

• Kubernetes version information:

  kubectl version

kubectl version
Client Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"15", GitVersion:"v1.15.5", GitCommit:"20c265fef0741dd71a66480e35bd69f18351daea", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2019-10-15T19:16:51Z", GoVersion:"go1.12.10", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}
Server Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"15", GitVersion:"v1.15.5", GitCommit:"20c265fef0741dd71a66480e35bd69f18351daea", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2019-10-15T19:07:57Z", GoVersion:"go1.12.10", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}

• Kubernetes cluster kind:

  kubeadm (1.15.5)

• Manifests:

insert manifests relevant to the issue

• Prometheus Operator Logs:

Insert Prometheus Operator logs relevant to the issue here

• Prometheus Logs:

Insert Prometheus logs relevant to the issue here

Anything else we need to know?:

The issue is pretty simple to fix I just don't know if the patch should be provided in this repository or somewhere else.

[s-urbaniak]

indeed, we might need to bump the grafana version here, @pgier wdyt? :-)

[paulfantom]

Maybe let's fix dashboard coming from kubernetes-mixins to remove additional non-standard panel? This way we won't need to install panel plugin which gives us a piechart.

Additionally piechart is the most meaningless and worthless panel type and we shouldn't use it at all. More on that topic can be found in:
1) https://www.data-to-viz.com/caveat/pie.html
2) "Information Dashboard Design - Displaying data for at-a-glance monitoring" by Stephen Few, Chapter 8 - "Ideal library of graphs", Section "Dysfunctional Graphs that We Should Avoid" (p. 143).

[brancz]

Agreed I think the pie chart shouldn’t be there in the first place.

[combor]

I just deployed master and it seems that grafana-piechart-panel is still there.

[metalmatze]

I think I just read a discussion about removing it in the upstream kubernetes-mixin project. Once that's done we can update the dependency here and we should be good.

[bgagnon]

Not that it matters if the pie charts are removed, but for future reference there's a simpler way to install Grafana plugins at runtime via the GF_INSTALL_PLUGINS environment variable:
https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/installation/docker/#installing-grafana-plugins