LFS260 - Lab 6.4 - Linkerd-viz no longer comes with Grafana pre-installed

muhammed55053

Lab 6.4 of LFS260 guides the student to install linkerd and tells the student to interact with the Grafana components in linkerd.
However, following the installation instructions in the lab, Grafana does not become available. The buttons shown in the lab screenshot simply are not there.

According to linkerd, it used to be the case that Grafana came pre-installed with linkerd-viz, but that is no longer the case:

In earlier versions of Linkerd, the viz extension also pre-installed a Grafana dashboard. As of Linkerd 2.12, due to licensing changes in Grafana, this is no longer the case.

Solution
Following the instructions on the linkerd webpage, I was able to install Grafana and also hook it to the Linkerd Viz Dashboard.
Simply at step 5 of the lab, we have to first run

helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm install grafana -n grafana --create-namespace grafana/grafana \
  -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/linkerd/linkerd2/main/grafana/values.yaml

in order to install Grafana into our cluster
and instead of the command
linkerd viz install | kubectl apply -f -
we have to run the command
linkerd viz install --set grafana.url=grafana.grafana | kubectl apply -f -

After that, we still have to run the other steps outlined in the lab in order to make the dashboard available again, such as

kubectl-n linkerd-viz edit svc web
kubectl-n linkerd-viz edit deployments.apps web

I recommend to update the lab instructions in order to incorporate this change in linkerd-viz.