grafana_alerts_images

Grafana alert emails with images

Images can be embedded in Grafana alerts using the Grafana Image Renderer Plugin

How it works

Grafana uses chromium (a headless browser) to render Grafana panels to PNG files
The plugin comes with chromium and Node JS installed, so separate installation of these dependencies is not required

Open a command line in the Grafana bin folder and then run the following command

grafana-cli.exe plugins install grafana-image-renderer

This command downloads plugin from internet and keeps it in the grafana→data→plugins folder of Grafana installation

Download the zip file from GitHub at https://github.com/grafana/grafana-image-renderer/releases
Check Grafana version compatibility while downloading
unzip the plugin files in the grafana→data→plugins folder of Grafana installation (For example “C:\Program Files\GrafanaLabs\data\plugins")

In the defaults.ini file [unified_alerting.screenshots] section, keep capture = true
Some settings are also present in the [plugin.grafana-image-renderer] section of the defaults.ini Grafana config file’s (Example: “C:\Program Files\GrafanaLabs\grafana\conf\defaults.ini”)

After setting up Grafana Image Renderer, Grafana dashboard panel should be linked in the alert rule as shown below for the image to be created for email

Grafana logs can be super useful to check if Grafana Image Renderer plugin is running without any problems
Open the grafana.log file in the grafana→data→log folder of Grafana installation (For example “C:\Program Files\GrafanaLabs\data\log")
Search for “grafana-image-renderer” in the grafana.log file to see the logs related to the plugin

Grafana Image renderer plugin renders the images itself by default using the chromium browser bundled with it
But the plugin can also use a remote rendering service to offload the job of image rendering. This can be useful when the server running Grafana has some missing dependencies or incompatibilities.
Create a remote rendering server using the following steps
- Clone the Grafana image renderer plugin Git repository.
- Install dependencies and build:
```
yarn install --pure-lockfile
yarn run build
```
- Run the server on a desired port:
```
node build/app.js server --port=8081
```
- Update Grafana configuration to mention the details of the remote rendering service:
```
[rendering]
server_url = http://localhost:8081/render
callback_url = http://localhost:3000/
```
- Restart Grafana.

Video on this post can be seen here