# Utilising email support for reporting from grafana **URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/utilising-email-support-for-reporting-from-grafana/294504 **Category:** Data & reporting **Created:** [February 7, 2024, 6:54am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/utilising-email-support-for-reporting-from-grafana/294504 "2024-02-07T06:54:31Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Page:** 1
### Author: ![aidanheerdegen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/aidanheerdegen/32/277061_2.png) [@aidanheerdegen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/aidanheerdegen) #### Post date: [February 7, 2024, 6:54am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/utilising-email-support-for-reporting-from-grafana/294504/1 "2024-02-07T06:54:32Z")
## Background and Aims I have a grafana instance hosted on [grafana.com/products/cloud/](https://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](https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/dashboards/create-reports/) 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 > [@Configuring incoming email to create new topics or group messages](https://meta.discourse.org/t/configure-incoming-email-to-create-new-topics-or-group-messages/62977): > > bookmark This guide explains how to set up incoming emails to create new topics or group messages in Discourse, including configuration of site settings and category or group-specific settings. person_raising_hand Required user level: Administrator This guide covers: Enabling and configuring incoming emails Choosing between category and group for incoming emails Setting up incoming emails for a group Setting up incoming emails for a category Deciding how forwarded emails are handled … 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!