jayseek / ruby-grafana-reporter

Reporting Service for Grafana

Ruby Grafana Reporter

Reporting Service for Grafana

Table of Contents

• About the project
• Features
• Quick Start
• Grafana integration
• Webservice overview
• Roadmap
• Donations

About the project

Did you ever want to create (professional) reports based on Grafana dashboards? I did so in order to being able to automatically get monthly reports of my home's energy usage. That's how it started.

Features

• Build reports based on grafana dashboards, PDF (default) and many other formats supported
• Easy-to-use configuration wizard, including fully automated functionality to create a demo report
• Include dynamic content from grafana (find here a reference for all asciidcotor reporter calls):
  • panels as images
  • tables based on grafana panel queries or custom database queries (no images!)
  • single values to be integrated in text, based on grafana panel queries or custom database queries
• Multi purpose use of the reporter
  • webservice to be called directly from grafana
  • standalone command line tool, e.g. to be automated with cron or bash scrips
  • seemlessly runs from asciidocotor docker container without further dependencies
• Webhook callbacks before, on cancel and on finishing callbacks (see configuration file)
• Solid as a rock, also in case of template errors and whatever else may happen
• Full API documentation available

Functionalities are provided as shown here:

Database	Image rendering	Panel-based rendering	Query-based rendering
all SQL based datasources	supported	supported	supported
Graphite	supported	supported	supported
Prometheus	supported	supported	supported
other datasources	supported	not-supported	not-supported

Quick Start

You don't have a grafana setup runnning already? No worries, just configure https://play.grafana.org in the configuration wizard and see the magic happen!

If your grafana setup requires a login, you'll have to setup an api key for the reporter. Please follow the steps described here first.

Windows:

• Download latest Windows executable
• ruby-grafana-reporter -w

Raspberry Pi:

• sudo apt-get install ruby
• gem install ruby-grafana-reporter
• ruby-grafana-reporter -w

Ruby environment:

• gem install ruby-grafana-reporter
• ruby-grafana-reporter -w

Docker environment (advanced users):

• Download latest single-rb file to an empty folder
• create a configuration file by calling ruby ruby-grafana-reporter -w (if in doubt, run the command within your docker container)
• create file /<<path-to-single-rb-file-folder>>/startup.sh with the following content:

cd /documents
ruby bin/ruby-grafana-reporter

• add asciidoctor your compose yaml:

asciidoctor:
  image: asciidoctor/docker-asciidoctor
  container_name: asciidoctor
  hostname: asciidoctor
  volumes:
    - /<<path-to-single-rb-file-folder>>:/documents
  command:
    sh /documents/startup.sh
  restart: unless-stopped

• start/restart the asciidoctor docker container

Grafana integration

The key feature of the report is, that it can easily be integrated with grafana.

For accessing the reporter from grafana, you need to simply add a link to your grafana dashboard:

• Open the dashboard configuration
• Select Links
• Select Add
• Fill out as following:
  • Type: link
  • Url: http://<<your-server-url>>:<<your-webservice-port>>/render?var-template=demo_report
  • Title: Demo Report
  • Select Time range
  • Select Variable values
• Select Add

Now go back to your dashboard and click the newly generated Demo Report link on it. Now the renderer should start it's task and show you the expected results.

Please note, that the reporter won't automatically refresh your screen to update the progress. Simply hit F5 to refresh your browser. After the report has been successfully built, it will show the PDF after the next refresh automatically.

You want to select a template in grafana, which shall then be rendered? Piece of cake: Just add a dashboard variable to your grafana dashboard named template and let the user select or enter a template name. To make use of it, you should change the link of the Demo Report link to http://<<your-server-url>>:<<your-webservice-port>>/render?. On hitting the new link in the dashboard, grafana will add the selected template as a variable and forward it to the reporter.

Webservice overview

Running the reporter as a webservice provides the following URLs

/overview - for all running or retained renderings
/render - for rendering a template, 'var-template' is the only mandatory GET parameter
/view_report - for viewing the status or receving the result of a specific rendering, is automatically called after a successfull /render call
/cancel_report - for cancelling the rendering of a specific report, normally not called manually, but on user interaction in the /view_report or /overview URL

The main endpoint to call for report generation is configured in the previous chapter Grafana integration.

However, if you would like to see, currently running report generations and previously generated reports, you may want to call the endpoint /overview.

Roadmap

This is just a collection of things, I am heading for in future, without a schedule.

• Support all grafana datasources
• Solve code TODOs
• Become rubocop ready

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute, please fork the repository and use a feature branch. Pull requests are warmly welcome.

Licensing

The code in this project is licensed under MIT license.

Acknowledgements

• asciidoctor
• asciidoctor-pdf
• grafana

Inspired by Izak Marai's grafana reporter

Donations

If this project saves you as much time as I hope it does, and if you'd like to support my work, feel free donate. :)