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Documentation Grafana documentation Set up Set up image rendering

Set up image rendering

The Grafana Image Renderer service enables you to render web pages in Grafana to PDFs, PNGs, and CSVs. For example, you can export your panels or dashboards to PDFs to share with business stakeholders, or set up automatic exports for Slack alert notifications, so you see your failing alerts with context. Some features are exclusive to Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud.

Installation

To install the service, we recommend using Docker or other containerisation software. This is not strictly required, however, so you can adapt to your specific environment as needed.

We ship images for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64; Windows and macOS can run these images with Docker Desktop. Additionally, we ship binaries for Windows and Linux on our GitHub Releases page.

To run the service, use a server with significant memory and CPU resources available. Some rendering tasks can require several gigabytes of memory and many cores in a spiky pattern. For a general recommendation, we suggest you allocate at least 16 GiB of memory and at least 4 CPU cores; you may have to adapt this to your specific use-case if your load is significant.

Install with Docker

While we ship a latest tag, you should generally prefer pinning a specific version in production environments. We do, however, commit to keeping the latest tag the latest stable release.

shell Copy

docker network create grafana
docker run --network grafana --name renderer --rm --detach grafana/grafana-image-renderer:latest
# The following is not a production-ready Grafana instance, but shows what env vars you should set:
docker run --network grafana --name grafana --rm --detach --env GF_RENDERING_SERVER_URL=http://renderer:8081/render --env http://grafana:3000/ --port 3000:3000 grafana/grafana-enterprise:latest

Alternatively, if you prefer docker compose:

YAML Copy

services:
  renderer:
    image: grafana/grafana-image-renderer:latest

  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana-enterprise:latest
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    environment:
      GF_RENDERING_SERVER_URL: http://renderer:8081/render
      GF_RENDERING_CALLBACK_URL: http://grafana:3000/

If you are running with memory limits, you may want to set the environment variable GOMEMLIMIT to a lower value than the limit, such as 1GiB. You should not aim for the GOMEMLIMIT to match the container’s limit because Chromium needs free memory on top. We recommend 1 GiB of GOMEMLIMIT per 8 GiB of container memory limit.

If you do not use memory limits, the previous configuration can still be useful, especially if you run the service alongside other services on the same host.

Install with binaries

Binaries are released for Linux and Windows, for amd64 and arm64 architectures. macOS is not supported at this time; you should prefer Docker Desktop.

The binaries do not ship with a browser; you must install your own Chromium-based browser on your own, and configure it to be used. Examples of these include Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Configure the path to this browser binary with --browser.path.

The binaries are hosted on GitHub Releases. Download the appropriate binary for your platform, and run it from the terminal. You would run something like ./grafana-image-renderer server; see --help for more information.

Configuration

You can configure the service several ways:

• Set CLI flags. See --help for the available flag names.
• Use environment variables. See --help for the names and current values. Most, but not all, variables map 1:1 to the CLI flag names.
• Use a JSON or YAML configuration file. This must be in the service’s current working directory, and must be named either config.json, config.yaml, or config.yml. Dot-separated keys are nested keys. For example: a.b becomes {"a": {"b": "VALUE"}} in the file.

You can see all the current configuration options by checking --help.

For example, see: docker run --rm grafana/grafana-image-renderer:latest server --help.

Security

The service requires a secret token to be present in all render requests. This token is set by --server.auth-token (AUTH_TOKEN); you can specify multiple and have a unique key per Grafana instance. By default, the token used is -. In Grafana, you must set this to match one of the tokens with the [rendering] renderer_token (GF_RENDERING_RENDERER_TOKEN) configuration setting.

Monitoring

You can monitor the service via Prometheus or Mimir and any OpenTelemetry-compatible Tracing backend (like Grafana Tempo). Metrics are exposed on /metrics and traces are sent as configured in the configuration options (see --help).

You can find an example dashboard here.