New in Grafana 9.1: Share your Grafana dashboard with anyone via public dashboards

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new feature we’ve been working on in Grafana 9.1: public dashboards 🎉. The public dashboards feature will allow you to share your Grafana dashboard with anyone, even if they’re not part of your Grafana organization. 

Historically, the only way that someone could share a dashboard externally was taking a one-time snapshot 📸, or disabling all authorization for their Grafana instance 😬. Both of these options work, but it left a major gap in our sharing and collaboration capabilities. The ability to share a dashboard securely and with up-to-date data was lacking.

Starting with Grafana 9.1, public dashboards will be an alpha feature that must be enabled with a feature toggle. (For Grafana Cloud, you will need to contact support to have the feature enabled.)

Once enabled, there will be a new option within the dashboard share menu (located in the upper left of any dashboard) where you can set your dashboard to be public. This will give you a link that you can share with anyone you’d like, and it will take the new user to the live, current version of your dashboard in a read-only kiosk view.

Securely share your Grafana dashboards

When sharing your Grafana dashboard with the world, there are some security and performance considerations. Grafana, by default, constructs queries on the frontend before sending them to your data source. This means those queries could be modified in the browser. For an authenticated user, this risk is minimal since it’s your own data. With public dashboards, we only use the queries stored in the database from the original dashboard and execute them on the backend. This prevents malicious users outside your Grafana instance from running arbitrary queries against your data source.

Maybe you’ve made a really popular dashboard? That’s great! But keep in mind that this can cause higher than expected traffic to your data source. To mitigate this, public dashboards can benefit from the query caching and rate limiting features that are available with Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud Pro and Advanced accounts.

Public Grafana dashboards: Alpha and beyond

Public dashboards are currently an alpha feature. What does this mean? It means that we believe what we have now is our users’ minimum loveable product 🧡, but that we’re still in the process of discovering which additional features will be meaningful to our users. If there are features you think would be helpful to you, we’d love to hear them. Let us know in our public dashboards Github discussion.

The good news is that we already have plans to add a lot of useful features. The bad news is that, with any alpha feature, there could be a few hiccups initially. Some add-ons that we’re considering for the future are:

• Allowing template variables
• Sharing with specific emails
• Multiple public dashboard configurations per dashboard
• New admin page to manage all public dashboards

See our public dashboards documentation for more details around how to enable the feature and its current limitations.

We are excited to see what Grafana dashboards you share with the world!

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