k8s/secret.yaml held the Grafana admin credentials and, since the MCP
server landed, its service account token — gitignored, so deploying this
stack required the right file to exist on the right laptop. It now comes
from Vault through External Secrets, and nothing sensitive has to exist
locally.
A dedicated store rather than reusing vault-kong-v2: that one's AppRole
carries kong-v2-readonly, scoped to secrets/data/kong-v2/*, so it cannot
see this path — confirmed with a probe ExternalSecret that failed with
"could not get secret data from provider". Widening that policy would have
handed the Kong reader observability's secrets for no reason. So
observability-readonly and observability-eso were created in Vault,
mirroring the existing pattern exactly.
The AppRole credentials stay out of git; the ClusterSecretStore comments
carry the commands that mint them.
dataFrom.extract pulls the whole path instead of naming each key, so a new
key in Vault reaches the cluster with no edit here. The target keeps the
name every consumer already uses, so neither the Grafana Deployment nor
mcp-grafana changed — verified, neither pod restarted and the token in the
cluster matches Vault byte for byte.
secret.example.yaml no longer describes a file to create; it documents
where the keys live and how the Grafana token is minted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Stéphane Tailland
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