Authenticating with OpenLDAP

Let’s start with one of the more venerable authentication schemes available today: Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), originally developed in the early 1990s. While it is often used to store user information for authentication purposes, it can also serve all kinds of directory information, including user groups, hostnames, network addresses, and even office addresses and phone numbers.

In this section, we’ll set up a simple directory using the OpenLDAP implementation and configure Grafana to bind to the OpenLDAP server to look up users and teams. This process can be a little bit complicated, but we’ll go through it step by step. It is beyond the scope of this book to go through the details of setting up and maintaining a production LDAP directory, but I will endeavor to explain things in some detail as we go along. If you are looking to integrate your Grafana server with an existing LDAP installation, this should give...