Use reporting and image rendering
In this guide, you learn how to create reports from your dashboards in Azure Managed Grafana. You can configure to have these reports emailed to intended recipients on a regular schedule or on-demand.
Generating reports in the PDF format requires Grafana's image rendering capability, which captures dashboard panels as PNG images. Azure Managed Grafana installs the image renderer for your instance automatically.
Image rendering performance
Image rendering is a CPU-intensive operation. An Azure Managed Grafana instance needs about 10 seconds to render one panel, assuming data query is completed in less than 1 second. The Grafana software allows a maximum of 200 seconds to generate an entire report. Dashboards should contain no more than 20 panels each if they're used in PDF reports. You may have to reduce the panel number further if you plan to include other artifacts (for example, CSV) in the reports.
Note
You'll see an "Image Rendering Timeout" error if a rendering request has exceeded the 200 second limit.
For screen-capturing in alerts, the Grafana software only allows 30 seconds to snapshot panel images before timing out. At most three screenshots can be taken within this time frame. If there's a sudden surge in alert volume, some alerts may not have screenshots even if screen-capturing has been enabled.
Note
Overloading the Grafana image renderer may cause it to become unstable. You can reduce the number of alerts that must include screenshots by only setting the Dashboard UID and Panel ID annotations in those alert rules.
Prerequisites
To follow the steps in this guide, you must have:
- An Azure account with an active subscription. Create an account for trial.
- An Azure Managed Grafana instance in the Standard plan. If you don't have one yet, create a new instance.
- An SMTP server. If you don't have one yet, you may want to consider using Twilio SendGrid's email API for Azure.
- Email set up for your Azure Managed Grafana instance. Configure SMTP settings.
Set up reporting
To create a new report, follow these steps.
- In the Azure portal, open your Azure Managed Grafana workspace and select the Endpoint URL.
- In the Grafana portal, go to Reporting > Reports and select + Create a new report.
- Complete the remaining steps in the Grafana UI.
Export dashboard to PDF
Note
The Grafana UI may change periodically. This article shows the Grafana interface and user flow at a given point. Your experience may slightly differ from the examples at the time of reading this document. If this is the case, refer to the Grafana Labs documentation.
To create a new report, follow these steps.
- In the Azure portal, open your Azure Managed Grafana workspace and select the Endpoint URL.
- In the Grafana portal, go to the dashboard you want to export.
- Click the Share dashboard icon.
- Choose a layout option in the PDF tab.
- Select Save as PDF to export.
Use image in alerts
Grafana allows screen-capturing a panel that triggers an alert. Recipients can see the panel image directly in the notification message. Azure Managed Grafana is currently configured to upload these screenshots to the local storage on your instance. Only the list of contact points in the Upload from disk column of the Supported contact points table can receive the images. In addition, there's a 30-second time limit for taking a screenshot. If a screenshot can't be completed in time, it isn't included with the corresponding alert. Screenshots are taken only for those alerts that have Dashboard UID and Panel ID annotations in the rule. You can use these annotations to disable screen-capturing selectively.
Next steps
In this how-to guide, you learned how to use reporting and image rendering. To learn how to create and configure Grafana dashboards, see Create dashboards.