Dashboard previews

The dashboard previews feature is an opt-in feature that is disabled by default. You can view dashboard previews after an administrator enables the feature, and after you select the new grid layout. The feature-enablement procedure is outlined in the following section.

• Enable dashboard previews
• Permissions

1. Install the Image Renderer plugin or set up a remote rendering service. The minimum version of Image Renderer required for the dashboard preview feature . Refer to Image rendering for more information.
2. Modify the to enable the dashboardPreviews feature toggle.

1. If running Grafana Enterprise with RBAC, enable .

2. Save your changes. Grafana should reload automatically; we recommend restarting the Grafana server in case of any issues.

The first crawler run should begin approximately five minutes after Grafana server restart.

To determine that your setup is successful, select the new grid layout and verify that the dashboard preview placeholders appear.

The dashboard previews crawler is a background process that:

• Visits and takes a screenshot of each dashboard

The crawler can be configured via the main config file. Check the dashboard previews section for more details.

During the initial crawler run, the list contains all dashboards across all organizations. During subsequent runs, the list will have fewer elements. It will only contain dashboards that:

• are new
• have changed since taking their last preview
• haven’t changed, but the crawler failed to take their preview during the initial run

Modifying a dashboard is the only way of refreshing that dashboard’s preview; previews do not have a set timeout after which they expire.

The crawler sends a render request to the Image Renderer for each dashboard in the list. The renderer is then instructed to open the dashboard in kiosk mode, take a screenshot, and scale it down to a small, 320 x 240px thumbnail. The following dashboard in Grafana Play is an example of kiosk mode: .

The crawler saves previews and their metadata in Grafana’s DB. Preview’s metadata contains, among other things, the from the time of taking the screenshot. During subsequent runs, the crawler uses the saved version to find stale dashboard previews.

The crawler is set up with the required permissions to display all dashboards and query all data sources. The way the permissions are set up depends on the version of Grafana.

In OSS and Enterprise Grafana instances without RBAC enabled, the crawler uses a special user with an Admin role. In an Enterprise Grafana instance with RBAC enabled, the crawler uses service accounts with three fixed roles:

• fixed:dashboards:reader

Service accounts are created per organization. They are visible in the service account configuration tab, and use the following naming convention: dashboard-previews-crawler-{organization_id}.

Currently, users can see the previews of all dashboards they have access to. Data source permissions are not yet taken into account - users can see previews of dashboards with data sources they can’t see or query.