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Visualize Singlestore Metrics with Grafana Dashboard

KubeDB exposes Singlestore metrics through a sidecar exporter. Once Prometheus scrapes those metrics, you can visualize them in Grafana using pre-built KubeDB dashboards. This tutorial walks through the full setup: deploying the monitoring stack, enabling monitoring on a Singlestore instance, and importing the Grafana dashboards.

Before You Begin

• You need a Kubernetes cluster with kubectl configured. If you do not already have a cluster, you can create one by using kind.

• KubeDB must be installed in your cluster with kubedb-metrics enabled. Follow the setup guide here and make sure to include the flag below during installation:

  --set kubedb-metrics.enabled=true
  

  kubedb-metrics creates MetricsConfiguration objects for each database type, which Panopticon (Step 2) uses to expose metrics to Prometheus.

• Singlestore requires a valid license secret. Create the license secret before deploying:

  $ kubectl create secret generic license-secret -n demo \
    --from-literal=username=license \
    --from-literal=password=<your-license-key>
  

• To keep monitoring resources isolated, we use a separate monitoring namespace and deploy the database in the demo namespace.

  $ kubectl create ns monitoring
  namespace/monitoring created
  
  $ kubectl create ns demo
  namespace/demo created
  

Note: YAML files used in this tutorial are stored in docs/examples/singlestore/monitoring folder in GitHub repository kubedb/docs.

Configuration

These two steps — deploying kube-prometheus-stack and installing Panopticon — are shared prerequisites for all KubeDB database monitoring guides. If you have already completed them in another guide, skip to Step 1.

Step 1: Deploy kube-prometheus-stack

kube-prometheus-stack installs Prometheus, Prometheus Operator, Alertmanager, and Grafana together. This is the recommended way to get the full monitoring stack on Kubernetes.

Add the prometheus-community Helm repo and install:

$ helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
$ helm repo update

$ helm upgrade --install prometheus prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack \
  --namespace monitoring \
  --set grafana.image.tag=7.5.5

Wait for all pods to be ready:

$ kubectl get pods -n monitoring
NAME                                                   READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
alertmanager-prometheus-kube-prometheus-alertmanager-0 2/2     Running   0          2m
prometheus-grafana-xxxx                                3/3     Running   0          2m
prometheus-kube-prometheus-operator-xxxx               1/1     Running   0          2m
prometheus-kube-prometheus-prometheus-0                2/2     Running   0          2m
prometheus-kube-state-metrics-xxxx                     1/1     Running   0          2m

Find the serviceMonitorSelector label that Prometheus uses to pick up ServiceMonitor objects. You will need this label when enabling monitoring on the Singlestore instance.

$ kubectl get prometheus -n monitoring -o jsonpath='{.items[0].spec.serviceMonitorSelector}'
{"matchLabels":{"release":"prometheus"}}

The label is release: prometheus.

Step 2: Install Panopticon

Panopticon is the Appscode operator that reads MetricsConfiguration objects created by kubedb-metrics and exposes them to Prometheus. It must be installed before enabling kubedb-metrics.

$ helm repo add appscode https://charts.appscode.com/stable/
$ helm repo update

$ helm upgrade --install panopticon appscode/panopticon \
  --version v2026.4.30 \
  --namespace kubeops --create-namespace \
  --set monitoring.enabled=true \
  --set monitoring.agent=prometheus.io/operator \
  --set monitoring.serviceMonitor.labels.release=prometheus \
  --set-file license=/path/to/kubedb-license.txt \
  --wait --timeout 5m0s

Verify panopticon is running:

$ kubectl get pods -n kubeops
NAME                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
panopticon-xxxx               1/1     Running   0          1m

Setup

Step 1: Deploy Singlestore with Monitoring Enabled

Below is the Singlestore object with monitoring configured to use Prometheus Operator.

apiVersion: kubedb.com/v1alpha2
kind: Singlestore
metadata:
  name: sdb-grafana-demo
  namespace: demo
spec:
  version: "8.7.10"
  licenseSecret:
    kind: Secret
    name: license-secret
  deletionPolicy: WipeOut
  storage:
    storageClassName: "standard"
    accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
    resources:
      requests:
        storage: 1Gi
  monitor:
    agent: prometheus.io/operator
    prometheus:
      serviceMonitor:
        labels:
          release: prometheus
        interval: 10s

Here,

• monitor.agent: prometheus.io/operator tells KubeDB to create a ServiceMonitor for this instance.
• monitor.prometheus.serviceMonitor.labels must match the serviceMonitorSelector label of your Prometheus (release: prometheus).
• monitor.prometheus.serviceMonitor.interval sets the scrape interval to 10 seconds.

Create the Singlestore instance:

$ kubectl create -f https://github.com/kubedb/docs/raw/v2026.6.19/docs/examples/singlestore/monitoring/sdb-grafana-demo.yaml
singlestore.kubedb.com/sdb-grafana-demo created

Wait for it to be Ready:

$ kubectl get singlestore -n demo sdb-grafana-demo
NAME               VERSION   STATUS   AGE
sdb-grafana-demo   8.7.10    Ready    3m

KubeDB creates a stats service named {singlestore-name}-stats for the exporter:

$ kubectl get svc -n demo --selector="app.kubernetes.io/instance=sdb-grafana-demo"
NAME                     TYPE        CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)     AGE
sdb-grafana-demo         ClusterIP   10.96.10.1     <none>        3306/TCP    3m
sdb-grafana-demo-stats   ClusterIP   10.96.10.2     <none>        9104/TCP    3m

KubeDB also creates a ServiceMonitor in the demo namespace:

$ kubectl get servicemonitor -n demo
NAME                     AGE
sdb-grafana-demo-stats   3m

Verify it carries the correct label:

$ kubectl get servicemonitor -n demo sdb-grafana-demo-stats -o jsonpath='{.metadata.labels}'
{"release":"prometheus", ...}

Step 2: Verify Prometheus is Scraping

Port-forward the Prometheus pod:

$ kubectl port-forward -n monitoring \
  prometheus-prometheus-kube-prometheus-prometheus-0 9090
Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:9090 -> 9090
Forwarding from [::1]:9090 -> 9090

Open http://localhost:9090/targets in your browser. Look for an entry whose service label matches sdb-grafana-demo-stats. Its state should be UP.

If the target is missing, check that the ServiceMonitor label (release: prometheus) matches the Prometheus serviceMonitorSelector.

Step 3: Access Grafana

Port-forward the Grafana service:

$ kubectl port-forward -n monitoring svc/prometheus-grafana 3000:80
Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:3000 -> 80

Open http://localhost:3000. The username is admin. Retrieve the auto-generated password from the secret:

$ kubectl get secret -n monitoring prometheus-grafana \
  -o jsonpath='{.data.admin-password}' | base64 -d

After a successful login you will see the Grafana home page:

Step 4: Configure Prometheus as a Data Source

If you installed Grafana via kube-prometheus-stack, Prometheus is already configured as the default data source — skip to Step 5.

For a standalone Grafana installation:

1. Go to Connections → Data sources → Add new data source.

2. Select Prometheus.

3. Set the URL to your Prometheus service:

   http://prometheus-operated.monitoring.svc:9090
   

4. Click Save & test. You should see Data source is working.

Step 5: Import KubeDB Singlestore Dashboards

The KubeDB Singlestore dashboards are distributed as JSON files. Each JSON file is a complete dashboard definition — panels, queries, variables, and layout — that Grafana loads in one shot. Without importing, you would have to build every panel and write every PromQL query by hand. Importing lets you skip that entirely.

Three dashboards are available. Download all three JSON files from the appscode/grafana-dashboards repository (singlestore/ folder):

Import steps (repeat for each of the three files):

1. In Grafana, click Dashboards in the left sidebar.
2. Select Import from the menu.
3. Click Upload dashboard JSON file and select one of the downloaded .json files.
4. In the Prometheus dropdown that appears, select your Prometheus data source.
5. Click Import.

The import page looks like this:

After importing all three files, they will appear under Dashboards in the left sidebar.

Step 6: Explore the Dashboards

After opening a dashboard, use the dropdown filters at the top to focus on a specific instance.

KubeDB / Singlestore / Summary

Start here for a cluster-level overview. The dashboard has three sections:

General Info — status cards at the top:

• Database Status — current health (e.g., Ready)
• Version — Singlestore version running (e.g., 8.7.10)
• Require Secure TLS — whether TLS is enforced
• Deletion Policy — configured deletion policy (e.g., WipeOut)
• Total Nodes, CPU Request/Limit, Memory Request/Limit, Storage Request — resource configuration at a glance

CPU Info:

• CPU Usage — CPU consumption over time per pod
• CPU Quota — table showing CPU usage vs. requests and the usage percentage

Memory Info / Storage Info:

• Memory Quota — memory usage vs. requests and limits (RSS and cache breakdown)
• Disk Usage — disk consumed over time
• Disk R/W Info — read vs. write bytes per second
• IOPS — combined reads and writes per second
• ThroughPut — read and write throughput

KubeDB / Singlestore / Pod

Drill into a specific pod. The dashboard has three sections:

Singlestore Pod Summary — stat cards at the top:

• Singlestore Uptime — how long the pod has been running
• Version — Singlestore engine version on this pod
• Current QPS — queries per second on this pod
• Transaction Buffer — current transaction buffer size

Pod CPU, Memory and File Descriptor Stats:

• CPU Usage — per-pod CPU consumption over time
• Memory Usage — per-pod memory consumption over time
• Open File Descriptors — number of open file handles

Connections:

• Singlestore Connections — active client connections on this pod
• Singlestore Aborted Connections — connection attempts that failed
• Client Threads — threads handling client requests

KubeDB / Singlestore / Database

Database-level operational metrics:

• Service Status — table listing pod endpoints and their service names
• Service Uptime — how long each service has been available
• Current QPS — query throughput across the database
• Singlestore Connections — active connections to the database
• Disk Reads vs Writes — per-pod read and write activity over time
• Network Received vs Sent — inbound and outbound network traffic per pod

Cleaning up

# Remove the Singlestore instance
kubectl delete singlestore -n demo sdb-grafana-demo

# Remove the license secret
kubectl delete secret license-secret -n demo

# Remove namespaces
kubectl delete ns demo

# Uninstall monitoring stack (optional)
helm uninstall prometheus -n monitoring
helm uninstall panopticon -n kubeops
kubectl delete ns monitoring kubeops

Next Steps

• Monitor your Singlestore instance with KubeDB using Prometheus Operator.
• Want to hack on KubeDB? Check our contribution guidelines.