Getting Started with kube-prometheus-stack: Finding Your Grafana Password

If you’re diving into the world of Kubernetes monitoring, the kube-prometheus-stack is a powerful toolkit that combines Prometheus, Grafana, and Alertmanager, among other components, to provide comprehensive monitoring and alerting capabilities. As you start setting up your kube-prometheus-stack, you might run into a common issue: locating the Grafana admin password.

Step-by-Step Guide to Retrieve Your Grafana Password

When you deploy the kube-prometheus-stack, a default Grafana admin password is generated and stored in a Kubernetes secret. To access this password, follow these simple steps:

1. Identify the Namespace: First, ensure you know the namespace where your kube-prometheus-stack is running. For this example, let’s assume your namespace is monitoring.

2. Retrieve the Password: Use the following kubectl command to fetch the Grafana admin password from the secret. Replace monitoring with your actual namespace if it’s different.

   kubectl get secret -n monitoring grafana -o jsonpath="{.data.admin-password}" | base64 --decode ; echo

   Here’s a breakdown of the command:

   • kubectl get secret -n monitoring grafana: This part of the command retrieves the Grafana secret from the specified namespace.
   • -o jsonpath="{.data.admin-password}": This option extracts the admin password from the secret.
   • | base64 --decode: The password is base64 encoded, so this decodes it to a readable format.
   • ; echo: This ensures a newline is added after the password is printed.

3. Default Username: The default username for Grafana is admin.

Example

Let’s assume you’re working in the monitoring namespace. Open your terminal and run the following command:

kubectl get secret -n monitoring grafana -o jsonpath="{.data.admin-password}" | base64 --decode ; echo

After executing this command, you should see the admin password printed out. Use admin as the username and this password to log into Grafana.

Conclusion

Retrieving your Grafana password in the kube-prometheus-stack is a straightforward process once you know where to look. This quick tip ensures you can access your Grafana dashboard and start leveraging its powerful visualization and monitoring features without any hassle.