Utilising email support for reporting from grafana

[aidanheerdegen]

Background and Aims

I have a grafana instance hosted on grafana.com/products/cloud/.

I want to share some dashboards from grafana to our hosted discourse in an automatic manner.

There are security issues with some of the embedding options for public grafana dashboards, so this is not allowed on a grafana cloud hosted instance.

Reports via email

Grafana reporting has the ability to create snapshots of dashboards and email them on a schedule.

This got me thinking about using discourse’s ability to ingest emails to send the generated reports to the forum. The questions is …

Will this work? What are the limitations?

Categories

I’m on a hosted instance, so I can configure incoming emails to a category

Configure incoming email to create new topics or group messages

If you have already set up reply via email, or you are on a hosting plan that pre-configures your incoming email, you’re now ready to set up Starting a New Topic via Email. Site Settings The incoming emails feature is globally controlled by these 3 site settings: email_in: this is the only setting that must be enabled for incoming emails to work. email in allowed groups: a user must belong to this group in order to send an email to Discourse. enable_staged_users: create staged users for unkno…

and use the email address from grafana.

Ideally I’d want the reports to be a reply to an existing topic. That way our users could watch a topic to get updates when they were available. We could also set options like auto-delete replies so the topic didn’t get overwhelmed with stale replies. If reporting was weekly we could set the auto-delete such that there was only ever the latest report.

I don’t think this is possible however. It seems that the functionality for emailing the forum only allows for either creating a whole new topic, or replying to a specific post with an auto-generated email address.

Could I reuse the auto-generated email address somehow, and just always reply to the original topic?

If I had to create a new topic every time is there a way I can automatically delete old versions of the reporting post? That might work if I have special category for this purpose, but I’d like to embed these reports in existing categories, as I want to have tailored reports for different categories.

Groups

The best option might be to email a group rather than a category. For my case groups have a 1:1 correspondence to categories, so it is an option.

Again it would have to be a new message every time I assume?

Any other options?

Have I covered the options here for autogenerated reports being email to a hosted discourse instance? Are there any other things I could try?

Thanks!