PDF export of Grafana dashboard via snapshot

grafana_pdf_via_snapshot.md

Get PDF export of Grafana dashboard

Note

As currently described, this approach does not work. The reason for that is that creating a snapshot via the API does not actually populate any data, as described in e.g. https://community.grafana.com/t/snapshot-using-http-api-does-nothing/. An alternative approach which does work described in https://gist.github.com/svet-b/1ad0656cd3ce0e1a633e16eb20f66425.

Prerequisites

Packages:

• The jq JSON processing command line tool, which is available for most distributions (https://stedolan.github.io/jq/, sudo apt install jq)
• NodeJS, and the puppeteer package (npm install puppeteer), which is used to run headless Chrome

Scripts:

• The pdf.js file attached here, which carries out the PDF conversion

Also, create Grafana API key from web UI (http://docs.grafana.org/http_api/auth/ has some outdated instructions but the idea holds). Save it in an environment variable, along with your Grafana instance URL

export APIKEY=eyJrIjoiMFdmMnA3YlRZTFF5bktqUmhRRk9nUzBISEo0dkZMNW0iLCJuIjoicGRmIiwiaWQiOjF9
export GURL=http://localhost:3000

Process

First we need to take a snapshot of the dashboard to be exported. We can do this via the API, per http://docs.grafana.org/http_api/snapshot/, but in order to request this we actually need the full dashboard JSON. This can be obtained via another API call, based on the dashboard ID - here saved as dashboard.json:

export DASHID=x3g4Wx5ik
curl -X GET -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIKEY" $GURL/api/dashboards/uid/$DASHID -o dashboard.json

Now create the snapshot via a call to the respective API endpoint. Note that here we directly submit the dashboard JSON of which we'd like a snapshot.

curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIKEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d @dashboard.json $GURL/api/snapshots -o snapshot.json

The result is saved in snapshot.json. From this we can extract the URL of the generated snapshot.

export SNAPURL=`jq .url snapshot.json`

Now export to PDF with

node pdf.js $SNAPURL output.pdf

pdf.js

/**
 * Copyright 2017 Google Inc. All rights reserved.
 *
 * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
 * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 * You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */

'use strict';

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

// URL to load should be passed as first parameter
const url = process.argv[2].replace (/(^")|("$)/g, '');

// Output file name should be second parameter
const outfile = process.argv[3];

// TODO: Output an error message if number of arguments is not right or arguments are invalid

(async() => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();

  await page.goto(url, {waitUntil: 'networkidle2'});

  // Wait for any warnings to disappear
  await page.waitFor(10000);

  // page.pdf() is currently supported only in headless mode.
  // @see https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=753118
  await page.pdf({
    path: outfile,
    format: 'A4',
    scale: 0.75,
    displayHeaderFooter: false,
    printBackground: false,
    margin: {
      top: 0,
      right: 0,
      bottom: 0,
      left: 0,
    },
  });

  await browser.close();
})();