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Documentation Grafana documentation Dashboards Reporting

Create and manage reports

Reporting allows you to automatically generate PDFs from any of your dashboards and have Grafana email them to interested parties on a schedule. This is available in Grafana Cloud and in Grafana Enterprise.

Any changes you make to a dashboard used in a report are reflected the next time the report is sent. For example, if you change the time range in the dashboard, then the time range in the report also changes, unless you’ve configured a custom time range.

Requirements

• SMTP must be configured for reports to be sent. Refer to SMTP in Configuration for more information.
• The Image Renderer plugin must be installed or the remote rendering service must be set up. Refer to Image rendering for more information.

Rendering configuration

When generating reports, each panel renders separately before being collected in a PDF. You can configure the per-panel rendering timeout and number of concurrently rendered panels.

To make a panel more legible, you can set a scale factor for the rendered images. However, a higher scale factor increases the file size of the generated PDF.

You can also specify custom fonts that support different Unicode scripts. The DejaVu font is the default used for PDF rendering.

These options are available in the reporting configuration of the ini file for Enterprise Grafana.

Access control

When RBAC is enabled, you need to have the relevant Permissions to create and manage reports.

Create a report

Only organization administrators can create reports by default. You can customize who can create reports with Role-based access control.

The report creation process is multi-step, but you don’t need to complete these steps in order and you can skip steps by clicking a step name at the top of the page:

To create a report, follow these steps:

1. Click Dashboards > Reporting in the main menu.
2. Click + Create a new report.
3. Complete the report steps, as needed; you don’t need to complete these steps in order and you can skip steps by clicking a step name at the top of the page:
   • Select dashboard
   • Format report
   • Schedule
   • Share
   • Confirm
4. Click one of the following buttons in the top-right corner of the screen:
   • Send now or Schedule send - The report is sent according the schedule you’ve set.
   • Save as draft - You can save a draft at any point during the report creation or update process, even if it’s missing required fields. The report won’t be sent according to its schedule while it’s a draft.
   • Discard - Delete the report draft. This action can’t be reversed.

1. Select dashboard

At this step, select the dashboard or dashboards on which the report is based, as well as the variables and time range for those dashboards. The options are:

Template variables

This option is only displayed if the dashboard has variables.

You can configure report-specific template variables for the dashboard on the report page. The variables that you select will override the variables from the dashboard, and they are used when rendering a PDF file of the report. For detailed information about using template variables, refer to the Templates and variables section.

The query variables saved with a report might become out of date if the results of that query change. For example, if your template variable queries for a list of hostnames and a new hostname is added, then it will not be included in the report. If that occurs, the selected variables must be manually updated in the report. If you select the All value for the template variable or if you keep the dashboard’s original variable selection, then the report stays up-to-date as new values are added.

Time range

By default, reports use the saved time range of the dashboard. Optionally, you can change the time range of the report by:

• Saving a modified time range to the dashboard. Changing the dashboard time range without saving it doesn’t change the time zone of the report.
• Setting a time range via the Time range field in the report form. If specified, the custom time range overrides the time range from the report’s dashboard.

The page header of the report displays the time range for the dashboard’s data queries.

Report time zones

Reports use the time zone of the dashboard from which they’re generated. You can control the time zone for your reports by setting the dashboard to a specific time zone. Note that this affects the display of the dashboard for all users.

If a dashboard has the Browser Time setting, the reports generated from that dashboard use the time zone of the Grafana server. As a result, this time zone might not match the time zone of users creating or receiving the report.

If the time zone is set differently between your Grafana server and its remote image renderer, then the time ranges in the report might be different between the page header and the time axes in the panels. To avoid this, set the time zone to UTC for dashboards when using a remote renderer. Each dashboard’s time zone setting is visible in the time range controls.

2. Format report

At this step, set the report formatting options. You can select multiple options:

• Attach the report as a PDF
• Include table data as PDF appendix (Public preview only)
• Embed a dashboard image in the email
• Attach a CSV file of the table panel data
• Attach a separate PDF of table data (Public preview only)

Attach the report as a PDF

If you selected the PDF format option, under the Style the PDF section, set the following options:

• Show template variables - Click the checkbox to select this option.
• Orientation - Set the report orientation in Portrait or Landscape. Refer to the Layout and orientation table to see examples.
• Layout - Select one of the following:
  • Simple - Renders each panel as full-width across the PDF. Refer to the Layout and orientation table to see examples.
  • Grid - Renders the PDF with the same panel arrangement and width as the source dashboard. Refer to the Layout and orientation table to see examples.
• Zoom - Zoom in to enlarge text in your PDF, or zoom out to see more data (like table columns) per panel.

Click Preview PDF in the top-right corner of the screen to view a rendered PDF with the options you selected.

Layout and orientation

Layout	Orientation	Description	Preview
Simple	Portrait	Generates an A4 page in portrait mode with three panels per page.
Simple	Landscape	Generates an A4 page in landscape mode with a single panel per page.
Grid	Portrait	Generates an A4 page in portrait mode with panels arranged in the same way as at the original dashboard.
Grid	Landscape	Generates an A4 page in landscape mode with panels arranged in the same way as in the original dashboard.

Embed a dashboard as an image in the email

You can send a report email with an image of the dashboard embedded in the email instead of attached as a PDF. In this case, the email recipients can see the dashboard at a glance instead of having to open the PDF.

Attach a CSV file of the table panel data

You can attach a CSV file to the report email for each table panel on the selected dashboard, along with the PDF report. By default, CSV files larger than 10Mb are not sent, which keeps email servers from rejecting the email. You can increase or decrease this limit in the reporting configuration.

This feature relies on the same plugin that supports the image rendering features.

When the CSV file is generated, it is temporarily written to the csv folder in the Grafana data folder.

A background job runs every 10 minutes and removes temporary CSV files. You can configure how long a CSV file should be stored before being removed by configuring the temp-data-lifetime setting. This setting also affects how long a renderer PNG file should be stored.

Click Download CSV in the top-right corner of the screen to see the file.

Table data in PDF

When there’s more data in your table visualizations than can be shown in the dashboard PDF, you can select one of these two options to access all table visualization data as PDF in your reports:

• Include table data as PDF appendix - Adds an appendix to the main dashboard PDF.
• Attach a separate PDF of table data - Generates a separate PDF file.

This feature relies on the same plugin that supports the image rendering features.

3. Schedule

At this step, set scheduling information. Options vary depending on the frequency you select.

4. Share

At this step, enter information related to sharing the report:

Click Send test email in the top-right corner of the screen to verify that the configuration works as expected and to verify that emails are working. You can choose to send this email to the recipients configured for the report, or to a different set of email addresses only used for testing. The last saved version of the report will be sent to selected emails.

5. Confirm

At this step, the confirmation page displays all your the settings. Review them and confirm that they’re correct or click the provided Edit links for each section to make updates.

Then, click Send now or Schedule send.

You can also save the report as a draft or discard it. Discarding the report is irreversible.

Send a report using the API

You can send reports programmatically with the send report endpoint in the HTTP APIs.

Manage reports

On the Reports page, you can view and manage your existing reports or create new ones.

Edit

To edit a report, follow these steps:

1. In the main menu, click Dashboards > Reporting.
2. Click the row of the report you want to update.
3. Click the Edit report button in the top-right hand corner or click the Edit link for a specific section to go to that one directly.
4. When you’ve finished making changes, click Confirm at the top of the screen to go to the last step.
5. Click Update report.

Pause or resume a report

You can pause and resume sending reports from the report list view. To do this, follow these steps:

1. In the main menu, click Dashboards > Reporting.

2. On the row of the report you want to update, do one of the following:

   • Click the pause icon - The report won’t be sent according to its schedule until it’s resumed.
   • Click the resume icon - The report resumes on its previous schedule.

Troubleshoot Reporting

To troubleshoot and get more log information, enable debug logging in the configuration file. Refer to Configuration for more information.

bash Copy

[log]
filters = report:debug