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Documentation Grafana documentation Dashboards Public dashboards

Public dashboards

Public dashboards allow you to share your Grafana dashboard with anyone. This is useful when you want to make your dashboard available to the world without requiring access to your Grafana organization. This differs from dashboard sharing, which either requires recipients to be users in the same Grafana organization or provides limited information, as with a snapshot.

You can see a list of all your public dashboards in one place by navigating to Dashboards > Public dashboards. For each dashboard in the list, the page displays the status, a link to view the dashboard, a link to the public dashboard configuration, and the option to revoke the public URL.

Security implications of making your dashboard public

• Anyone with the URL can access the dashboard.
• Public dashboards are read-only.
• Arbitrary queries cannot be run against your data sources through public dashboards. Public dashboards can only execute the queries stored on the original dashboard.

Enable the feature

Add the publicDashboards feature toggle to your custom.ini file.

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[feature_toggles]
publicDashboards = true

If you are using Docker, use an environment variable to enable public dashboards:

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--env GF_FEATURE_TOGGLES_ENABLE=publicDashboards

Make a dashboard public

1. Click the sharing icon in the dashboard header.
2. Click the Public dashboard tab.
3. Acknowledge the implications of making the dashboard public by selecting all the checkboxes.
4. Click Generate public URL to make the dashboard public and make your link live.
5. Copy the public dashboard link if you’d like to share it. You can always come back later for it.

Once you’ve made the dashboard public, a Public tag is displayed in the header of the dashboard.

Pause access

1. Click the sharing icon in the dashboard header.
2. Click the Public dashboard tab.
3. Enable the Pause sharing dashboard toggle.

The dashboard is no longer accessible, even with the link, until you make it shareable again.

Revoke access

1. Click the sharing icon in the dashboard header.
2. Click the Public dashboard tab.
3. Click Revoke public URL to delete the public dashboard.

The link no longer works. You must create a new public URL, as in Make a dashboard public.

Email sharing

Email sharing allows you to share your public dashboard with only specific people by email, instead of having it accessible to anyone with the URL. When you use email sharing, recipients receive a one-time use link that’s valid for one hour. Once the link is used, the viewer has access to the public dashboard for 30 days.

Invite a viewer

1. Click the sharing icon in the dashboard header.
2. Click the Public dashboard tab.
3. Acknowledge the implications of making the dashboard public by selecting all the checkboxes.
4. Click Generate public URL to make the dashboard public and make your link live.
5. Under Can view dashboard, click Only specified people.
6. Enter the email you want to share the public dashboard with.
7. Click Invite.
8. The recipient will receive an email with a one-time use link.

Viewers requesting access

If a viewer without access tries to navigate to the public dashboard, they’ll be asked to request access by providing their email. They will receive an email with a new one-time use link if the email they provided has already been invited to view the public dashboard and has not been revoked.

If the viewer doesn’t have an invitation or it’s been revoked, you won’t be notified and no link is sent.

Revoke access for a viewer

1. Click the sharing icon in the dashboard header.
2. Click the Public dashboard tab.
3. Click Revoke on the viewer you’d like to revoke access for.

Immediately, the viewer no longer has access to the public dashboard, nor can they use any existing one-time use links they may have.

Reinvite a viewer

1. Click the sharing icon in the dashboard header.
2. Click the Public dashboard tab.
3. Click Resend on the viewer you’d like to re-share the public dashboard with.

The viewer will receive an email with a new one-time use link. This will invalidate all previously issued links for that viewer.

View public dashboard users

To see a list of users who have accessed your dashboard by way of email sharing, take the following steps:

1. In the main sidebar navigation, click Administration.
2. Click Users.
3. Click the Public dashboard users tab.

From here, you can see the earliest time a user has been active in a dashboard, which public dashboards they have access to, and their role.

Access limitations

One-time use links use browser cookies, so when a viewer is granted access through one of these links, they will only have access on the browser they used to claim the link.

A single viewer cannot generate multiple valid one-time use links. When a new one-time use link is issued for a viewer, all previous ones are invalidated.

If a Grafana user has read access to the parent dashboard, they can view the public dashboard without needing to have access granted.

Assess public dashboard usage

You can check usage analytics about your public dashboard by clicking the insights icon in the dashboard header:

Learn more about the kind of information provided in the dashboard insights documentation.

Supported data sources

Public dashboards should work with any data source that has the properties backend and alerting both set to true in its plugin.json. However, this can’t always be guaranteed because plugin developers can override this functionality. The following lists include data sources confirmed to work with public dashboards and data sources that should work, but have not been confirmed as compatible.

Confirmed:

Unconfirmed:

Limitations

• Panels that use frontend data sources will fail to fetch data.
• Template variables are not currently supported, but support is planned in the future.
• Exemplars will be omitted from the panel.
• Only annotations that query the -- Grafana -- data source are supported.
• Organization annotations are not supported.
• Grafana Live and real-time event streams are not supported.
• Library panels are currently not supported, but support is planned in the future.
• Data sources using Reverse Proxy functionality are not supported.

We’re excited to share this enhancement with you and we’d love your feedback! Please check out the Github discussion and join the conversation.

Custom branding

If you’re a Grafana Enterprise customer, you can use custom branding to change the appearance of a public dashboard footer. For more information, refer to Custom branding.