Activate a Grafana Enterprise license from AWS Marketplace on EKS

If you have purchased a Grafana Enterprise subscription through AWS Marketplace, you must activate it in order to use Grafana Enterprise data source plugins and features in Grafana.

Before you begin:

• Purchase a subscription to Grafana Enterprise from AWS Marketplace.
• Be sure that the IAM user that was used to purchase Grafana Enterprise has permission to manage subscriptions, create new IAM users and roles, and create access policies.

To activate your license, complete the following tasks:

Task 1: Deploy Grafana Enterprise on Amazon EKS

1. Deploy Grafana Enterprise on Amazon EKS.

   For more information about deploying an application on Amazon EKS, refer to Getting started with Amazon EKS – AWS Management Console and AWS CLI.

   For more information about installing Grafana on Kubernetes using the Helm Chart, refer to the Grafana Helm Chart.

2. Use kubectl set image deployment/my-release grafana=grafana/grafana-enterprise:<version> to update the container image to Grafana Enterprise version 8.3.0 or later.

   For example, enter grafana/grafana-enterprise:8.3.3.

Only Grafana Enterprise versions 8.3.0 and later support licenses granted through AWS Marketplace.

Task 2: Configure Grafana for high availability

Grafana requires that you configure a database to hold dashboards, users, and other persistent data.

Before you begin

• Ensure that you have a supported Grafana database available.
  • For a list of supported databases, refer to Supported databases.
  • For information about creating a database, refer to Creating an Amazon RDS DB instance.
• Review the information required to connect to the RDS DB instance. For more information, refer to Connecting to an Amazon RDS DB instance.

To configure Grafana for high availability, choose one of the following options:

• Option 1: Use kubectl edit configmap grafana to edit grafana.ini add the following section to the configuration:

  [database]
  type = [database type]
  host = [database address and port]
  name = [database name]
  user = [database username]
  password = [database password]

• Option 2: use kubectl edit deployment my-release to edit the pod env variables and add the following database variables:

  - name: GF_DATABASE_TYPE
    value: [database type]
  - name: GF_DATABASE_HOST
    value: [database address and port]
  - name: GF_DATABASE_NAME
    value: [database name]
  - name: GF_DATABASE_USER
    value: [database username]
  - name: GF_DATABASE_PASSWORD
    value: [database password]

For more information on Grafana High Availability setup, refer to Set up Grafana for high availability.

Task 3: Configure Grafana Enterprise to validate its license with AWS

In this task, you configure Grafana Enterprise to validate the license with AWS instead of Grafana Labs.

1. In AWS IAM, assign the following permissions to the Node IAM role (if you are using a Node Group), or the Pod Execution role (if you are using a Fargate profile):

   • "license-manager:CheckoutLicense"
   • "license-manager:ListReceivedLicenses"
   • "license-manager:GetLicenseUsage"
   • "license-manager:CheckInLicense"

   For more information about creating an access policy, refer to Creating IAM policies (console).

   For more information about AWS license permissions, refer to Actions, resources, and condition keys for AWS License Manager.

2. Choose one of the following options to update the license_validation_type configuration to aws:

   • Option 1: Use kubectl edit configmap grafana to edit grafana.ini add the following section to the configuration:

     [enterprise]
     license_validation_type=aws

   • Option 2: Use kubectl edit deployment my-release to edit the pod env variables and add the following variable:

     name: GF_ENTERPRISE_LICENSE_VALIDATION_TYPE
     value: aws

Task 4: Start or restart Grafana

To activate Grafana Enterprise features, you must start (or restart) Grafana.

To restart Grafana on a Kubernetes cluster,

1. Run the command kubectl rollout restart deployment my-release.

2. After you update the service, navigate to your Grafana instance, sign in with Grafana Admin credentials, and navigate to the Statistics and Licensing page to validate that your license is active.

For more information about restarting Grafana, refer to Restart Grafana.

If you experience issues when you update the EKS cluster, refer to Amazon EKS troubleshooting.