Guide: Send grafana panels to Slack (Schedule and on-demand)

Grafana Configuration
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Hello!

We’re ramping up our usage of Grafana to track not only technical metrics but also product and some business metrics.
The need to share these graphs on a daily/weekly/monthly schedule came up from our product team. We use Slack and I was looking for a easy way to share our dashboards and panels in the team channels. All existing ways were quite complex and hard to “Just run” so I decided to build a fast and simple tool that only requires a grafana api key to setup and a link to the panel in question. I’ve only tested it with Grafana Cloud, but I believe it works fine for onprem deployments too.

It’s available here, for those that have the same need as we did: https://www.grafanaforslack.com/

I tried to post in the HowTo-section but could not pick it as a category. I hope I’m not posting in the wrong category.

Best,
Anders

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Hi @andersbb

This tool looks awesome! I’m eager to test it out…

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Thanks Matt! I’d be happy to hear any feedback you’ve got.

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@andersbb I’m trying to install this in a Slack sandbox and test it out. Is there a readme? It looks like it needs to use the Grafana Image renderer / reporting feature. Is that the case? Looking forward to getting this set up!

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Hello @mattabrams.

I haven’t gotten around to write a formal guide, I was hoping I could make the interface so easy so that no guides would be necessary.

Yes, it uses Grafanas Image renderer.

Short guide:

  1. Go to https://www.grafanaforslack.com and “Add to Slack”, confirm the permissions (no read, only write)

  2. Add an API key from Grafana to your grafanaforlsack account (Create one here)

  3. In Grafana, Open your dashboard, select the panel and choose share.

    image
    image1809×649 111 KB

  4. When the share modal opens up, copy the Direct Image link:

    image
    image1911×1132 147 KB

  5. On grafanaforslack, paste the url.

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I tried this tool in our environment (Grafana Cloud) and it was great!

Some questions:

  1. Is it production-ready?
  2. Do you plan to open-source it? I am concerned about security. I understand that you use as few permissions as possible though.
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  1. We use it in production. So, yes. But if you work in a field such as military / hospital, where information is life/death, I’d say no.
  2. When I get enough free time. I should probably add some further information about what the scopes I request do (and don’t) give access to. But I’ve tried to ask for as little as possible.
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It would be fantastic to open source it, I think!

I appreciate how you stood up a public API service. It makes the tool very plug-and-play, but passing Grafana API tokens into an unknown environment makes me a little wary. It’s a bit of a blocker for us re: testing / experimenting in anything other than a sandboxed Slack and test Grafana instance

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I get that @mattabrams. Will probably do it.

On a side track: I’m a strong believer in open source (building and maintaining passwordless-lib). But what I’ve learned from 3 years of work is that it’s a lot of work (issues, questions, code reviews, guidelines) and quite little reward/incentive other than self-fulfilling.

With that said, I’ll probably get around to it. Just trying to find more incentives other than self-fulfilling. (There are some work that I must do in order for it to be made public)

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