Introduction to Helm Dashboard

Visualizing your helm charts using the Helm Dashboard

Helm is one of the most widely adopted templating tools for Kubernetes. For every open-source application out there in the market we find a relevant helm chart for the same. Every Kubernetes resource can be embedded with helm and can be easily deployed. It's one of the go-to tools for deploying Kubernetes manifests. But how simple is that to manage? I still remember installing a helm chart that has around 2000 lines. It was so hard to go through each and every line. Is there a better way to handle this chaos? Yes, Helm Dashboard is to the rescue. Let us now understand how can we effectively use the helm dashboard to visualize the helm charts and their manifests as well. Helm Dashboard is an open-source project which offers a UI-driven way to view the installed Helm charts and see their revision history and corresponding k8s resources. Also, you can perform simple actions like roll back to a revision or upgrade to a newer version

Helm Dashboard

What is the entire story all about? (TLDR)

1. Visualise helm charts using the helm dashboard.
2. Understanding how the helm dashboard works.

Story Resources

1. GitHub Link: https://github.com/pavan-kumar-99/medium-manifests
2. GitHub Branch: helm-dashboard

Prerequisites

1. A Kubernetes Cluster ( EKS, AKS, Kind Cluster, etc ).

Installing Helm Dashboard

Helm Dashboard is an open-source project which offers a UI-driven way to view the installed Helm charts and see their revision history and corresponding k8s resources. Also, you can perform simple actions like roll back to a revision or upgrade to a newer version.

Some of the key capabilities of the tool:

• See all installed charts and their revision history
• See manifest diff of the past revisions
• Browse k8s resources resulting from the chart
• Easy rollback or upgrade version with a clear and easy manifest diff
• Integration with popular problem scanners
• Easy switch between multiple clusters

To install the plugin, simply run the Helm command:

helm plugin install https://github.com/komodorio/helm-dashboard.git

To use the plugin, your machine needs to have working helm and also kubectl commands. Helm version 3.4.0+ is required.

After installing, start the UI by running:

helm dashboard

Or the dashboard can also be installed via the helm chart.

helm repo add komodorio https://helm-charts.komodor.io
helm repo update
helm upgrade --install my-release komodorio/helm-dashboard

And boom, you should now have a UI opening up in the browser, that shows you the clusters available, the namespaces, and the charts installed on that specific cluster.

Once the dashboard has been opened you’d be able to see the manifests installed through the helm chart, the values used for installation, the resources created by the helm chart, and the notes of the helm chart.

HELM Dashboard UI discovery

The UI also provides an option to keep searching the helm chart repo for upgrades and also lets you uninstall the helm chart directly from the UI itself.

Well, that's it? Where are we solving the real problem? How will we be able to browse a very long helm chart? Let us use the Prometheus Operator helm chart (The Kube Prometheus Stack ) as an example. The Values files are around 3700 lines approximately. Let us now understand how the helm dashboard can help us easily install this chart even without the helm commands.

Adding Prometheus helm chart

Once you add the repository, you can now choose the chart to be installed and select it.

You can select the values and also override them via the UI itself. You can also select the version of the helm chart to be installed and also provide the custom values you need. Once you confirm, you should now see the chart installed on your cluster.

The Prometheus components should now be installed into your cluster.

Installed Prometheus components.

The UI also provides you the option to reconfigure the Prometheus from the UI and update it directly from the UI itself. Let us see that in Action.

For Instance, I would not want to create the RBAC policies for the Prometheus helm chart.

Prometheus Chart Helm Diff

As soon as you made the change you should see the diff being displayed on the UI itself. You should get feedback on all the resources that are either being deleted or being created. You should see the changes reflected in the cluster as soon as you apply them.

Closing Thoughts

So this is how the helm dashboard can be used to visualize the chart components, update them, configure them and delete them. This becomes a very friendly tool for all the Developers / DevOps Engineers and any other team working with helm charts. Please feel free to share your experience while implementing this in your clusters.

Until next time…..

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