The grafana.ini file should almost never change, so if it does, just delete the pod and have kubernetes restart it so the config gets read.
Edit the config file by running the ./edit-grafana-config.sh script.
See http://go/skia-infra-metrics
kube-state-metrics is run in all clusters allowing collection of metrics on the state of objects, in particular states you normally can't get from default metrics, such as cronjobs that have failed.
To update the version of kube-state-metrics find a later build in the official builds and update all the YAML files in k8s-config.