Plugins 〉Grafana Image Renderer
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Grafana Image Renderer
A Grafana backend plugin that handles rendering panels and dashboards to PNGs using a headless browser (Chromium).
Requirements
Supported operating systems
- Linux (x64)
- Windows (x64)
- Mac OS X (x64)
For Mac ARM64, you need to build the plugin from source or use the remote rendering installation.
Dependencies
This plugin is packaged in a single executable with Node.js runtime and Chromium browser. This means that you don't need to have Node.js and Chromium installed in your system for the plugin to function.
However, the Chromium browser depends on certain libraries. If you don't have all of those libraries installed in your system, you may see some errors when you try to render an image. For more information including troubleshooting help, refer to Grafana Image Rendering documentation.
Memory requirements
Rendering images requires a lot of memory, mainly because Grafana creates browser instances in the background for the actual rendering. We recommend a minimum of 16GB of free memory on the system rendering images.
Rendering multiple images in parallel requires an even bigger memory footprint. You can use the remote rendering service in order to render images on a remote system, so your local system resources are not affected.
Plugin installation
You can install the plugin using Grafana CLI (recommended way) or with Grafana Docker image.
Grafana CLI (recommended)
grafana-cli plugins install grafana-image-renderer
Grafana Docker image
This plugin is not compatible with the current Grafana Docker image and requires additional system-level dependencies. We recommend setting up another Docker container for rendering and using remote rendering instead. For instruction, refer to Run in Docker.
If you still want to install the plugin with the Grafana Docker image, refer to the instructions on building a custom Grafana image in Grafana Docker documentation.
Remote rendering service installation
Note: Requires an internet connection.
You can run this plugin as a remote HTTP rendering service. In this setup, Grafana renders an image by making an HTTP request to the remote rendering service, which in turn renders the image and returns it back in the HTTP response to Grafana.
You can run the remote HTTP rendering service using Docker or as a standalone Node.js application.
Run in Docker
Grafana Docker images are published at Docker Hub.
The following example shows how you can run Grafana and the remote HTTP rendering service in two separate Docker containers using Docker Compose.
Create a
docker-compose.ymlwith the following content:version: '2'services: grafana: image: grafana/grafana:latest ports: - ‘3000:3000’ environment: GF_RENDERING_SERVER_URL: http://renderer:8081/render GF_RENDERING_CALLBACK_URL: http://grafana:3000/ GF_LOG_FILTERS: rendering:debug renderer: image: grafana/grafana-image-renderer:latest ports: - 8081Next, run docker compose.
docker-compose up
Run as standalone Node.js application
The following example describes how to build and run the remote HTTP rendering service as a standalone Node.js application and configure Grafana appropriately.
Clone the Grafana image renderer plugin Git repository.
Install dependencies and build:
yarn install --pure-lockfile yarn run buildRun the server:
Using default configuration
node build/app.js serverUsing custom configuration
node build/app.js server --config=dev.jsonUsing environment variables
HTTP_PORT=8085 LOG_LEVEL=debug node build/app.js server
Update Grafana configuration:
[rendering] server_url = http://localhost:8081/render callback_url = http://localhost:3000/Restart Grafana.
Security
Access to the rendering endpoints is restricted to requests providing an auth token. This token should be configured in the Grafana configuration file and the renderer configuration file. This token is important when you run the plugin in remote rendering mode to avoid unauthorized file disclosure (see CVE-2022-31176).
See Grafana Image Rendering documentation to configure this secret token. The default value - is configured on both Grafana and the image renderer when you get started but we strongly recommend you to update this to a more secure value.
Configuration
For available configuration settings, please refer to Grafana Image Rendering documentation.
Troubleshooting
For troubleshooting help, refer to Grafana Image Rendering troubleshooting documentation.
