Grafana Health Model Panel

This repo contains a custom Grafana panel used for visualizing a health model based on KQL queries.

The health model panel was developed in support of the Azure Mission Critical project. Azure Mission-Critical is an open source project that provides a prescriptive architectural approach to building highly-reliable cloud-native applications on Microsoft Azure for mission-critical workloads. For more context on the application of this Grafana plugin, please refer to the Mission Critical project.

The health model has been implemented in Azure Log Analytics using KQL queries. This is a custom Grafana visualization panel, which can be used to visualize that health model. It's main purpose is to visualize, in an intuitive way:

• The health state of each component
• The hierarchical dependencies between components.

Contents

When the Dockerfile is built, a container is created with the following:

• Grafana
• Azure Monitor data source
• Healthmodelpanel custom visualization

Environment Variables

The container expects the following environment variables to be set:

Name	Value
GRAFANA_USERNAME	Username for the Grafana instance
GRAFANA_PASSWORD	Password used with username
AZURE_DEFAULT_SUBSCRIPTION	Id of the Azure subscription that holds the Log Analytics instances

Managed Identity

The data source has been set for Managed Identity authentication to Azure. This means that the infrastructure running the container, e.g. Azure App Service, should have its system-managed identity enabled and that identity should be assigned, at minimum, the 'Log Analytics Reader' permission on a scope that includes all required Log Analytics instances.

If you do not want to use the managed identity for connecting to Log Analytics, you can edit or remove config/provisioning/datasources/azure-monitor.yaml.

Grafana Authentication

Currently, authentication has been set to a username/password. Obviously this is not the best way in production scenarios, but OAuth authentication requires external dependencies that make this reference implementation harder to deploy and may be subject to security constraints in your local environment.

Before deploying this to your production environment, it is highly recommended to enable OAuth. This is done by editing the grafana.ini file and uncommenting/filling the values under the authentication section. Naturally, don't add secrets there. You can add ${MY_SECRET_VALUE} as a value and include that at runtime through environment variables.

Usage

Input Data

The panel depends on a Log Analytics query result that contains the relevant information. The following columns are required in the query result:

• ComponentName is the name of the component as it is displayed in the health model graph.
• Dependencies holds a comma-separated list of components that the specific component depends on. The names should match the 'ComponentName' value of the respective component.
• HealthScore is used to determine the color of the visualization. The values used here should match with the threshold values described in the panel options.

As an example, the query we use in the reference implementation is:

WebsiteHealthScore
| union ViewClaimUserFlowHealthScore
| union PostClaimUserFlowHealthScore
| union EventHubHealthScore
| union KeyvaultHealthScore
| union ClaimServiceHealthScore
| union ClaimWorkerHealthScore
| union ClusterHealthScore

This gives the following result, which is the input for the health model panel:

ComponentName	HealthScore	Dependencies
Website	1	ViewClaimUserFlow,PostClaimUserFlow
ViewClaimUserFlow	1	ClaimService,Keyvault
PostClaimUserFlow	1	Eventhub,ClaimWorker,Keyvault
ClaimService	1	Cluster
ClaimWorker	1	Cluster
EventHub	1
Keyvault	1
Cluster	1

This query is subsequently visualized in the following way:

Build & Deploy

Option 1: Docker Build for the entire Grafana container

1. Docker build: docker build -t grafana-healthmodelpanel .

This docker container contains a full Grafana install as well as the healthmodel panel and can be run directly on any container hosting environment. The required environment variable for running unsigned panels has already been set.

Option 2: Manually Build the healthmodel panel

1. Go to the healthmodelpanel directory

2. Install packages: yarn install

3. Build the project: yarn build

4. Copy ./dist/* to /var/lib/grafana/plugins/healthmodelpanel of your Grafana installation.

5. In order to run an unsigned Grafana panel, ensure that the following environment variable has been set: GF_PLUGINS_ALLOW_LOADING_UNSIGNED_PLUGINS="healthmodelpanel"