Add Grafana datasources

What you’ll accomplish

Connect Grafana to additional data sources beyond the defaults that ship with UDS Core. This is useful when your workloads depend on external metrics stores, tracing backends, or secondary log aggregators that Grafana needs to query alongside the built-in stack.

Prerequisites

• UDS CLI installed
• Access to a Kubernetes cluster with UDS Core deployed
• URL and any credentials for the external datasource you want to add

Before you begin

UDS Core configures Grafana with three datasources by default: Prometheus (metrics), Loki (logs), and Alertmanager (alerts). Use this guide when you need to connect Grafana to additional datasources — for example, an external Prometheus instance, Tempo for distributed tracing, or a second Loki deployment.

The extraDatasources value injects entries into the existing grafana-datasources ConfigMap that UDS Core manages. This keeps your configuration declarative and avoids needing to replace the entire ConfigMap.

Steps

1. Add a datasource via bundle overrides

   Define the new datasource under the extraDatasources value on the uds-grafana-config chart in the grafana component. Each entry follows the Grafana datasource provisioning format.

   uds-bundle.yaml

   packages:
     - name: core
       repository: registry.defenseunicorns.com/public/core
       ref: x.x.x-upstream
       overrides:
         grafana:
           uds-grafana-config:
             values:
               - path: extraDatasources
                 value:
                   - name: External Prometheus
                     type: prometheus
                     access: proxy
                     url: http://prometheus.example.com:9090

   Tip

   You can add multiple datasources in a single override by appending entries to the value list. Each entry needs at minimum a name, type, and url.

   Note

   Most external datasources require network egress from the grafana namespace. Use additionalNetworkAllow in your bundle overrides to permit this traffic. See Configure network access for Core services for details.

2. Create and deploy your bundle

   uds create <path-to-bundle-dir>
   uds deploy uds-bundle-<name>-<arch>-<version>.tar.zst

Verification

Open Grafana and navigate to Connections > Data sources. Confirm the new datasource appears in the list. Click Test on the datasource to verify connectivity.

# Verify the datasource ConfigMap includes your new entry
uds zarf tools kubectl get configmap grafana-datasources -n grafana -o yaml

Troubleshooting

Datasource not appearing in Grafana

Symptom: The new datasource does not show up in the Grafana data sources list after deployment.

Solution: Verify the bundle override path is correct: grafana component, uds-grafana-config chart, extraDatasources value. Redeploy the bundle and confirm the grafana-datasources ConfigMap in the grafana namespace contains your entry.

Connection test fails

Symptom: The datasource appears in Grafana but returns an error when you click Test.

Solution: Verify the URL is reachable from within the cluster. Check that network policies allow egress from the grafana namespace to the datasource endpoint.

Related Documentation

• Grafana: Data sources — full list of supported datasource types and configuration options
• Grafana: Provisioning data sources — YAML provisioning format reference

Next steps

These guides and concepts may be useful to explore next:

Add custom dashboards to Grafana Deploy dashboards that use your new datasource.

Monitoring & Observability concepts Background on how the monitoring stack fits together in UDS Core.