Hi!
We’re starting a Question of the Month series to tap into the collective wisdom of this community (and yes, we know there’s a lot of it here
).
Our inaugural question is a big one: 

Is there a dashboard or data visualisation feature you wish Grafana had?
No wrong answers: blue-sky ideas very welcome

Reporting is a big one for me.
I find that the ability to effectively export / share dashboards as a formal report deliverable PDF, Word, or Excel that has:
- pagination - currently it’s one long continous single page
- dynamically adjust to show the entire data in the vertical and horizontal scroll
- customisable front title page, content, formatting, etc.
is still lacking.
Yes, the enterprise version has a PDF export feature that somewhats achieve the need, i.e.:
- Grid: a snapshot of the default view into a single continous page
- Simple + Dynamic: 1 panel = 1 page (or extends to the next page if data overflows) but this ruins formatting and not customisable
Yes external link sharing to dashboard is there (and one can argue the dashboard is a better reporting itself due to it being live / interactive), but a formal and presentable external document will always have a strong customer use case.
Grafana is pretty much a BI tool. And, frankly, a strong one that can outshine actual BI tools like PowerBI. But it’s quirks and features like this is where it is lacking. And it’s why, I think, Grafana remains popular only with DevOp teams and not the wider business corporate world.
There are workarounds: individually exporting each panel and stitching them into a MS Word file, etc. and then post-processs to achieve the desired formatting / look, but this becomes too tedious.
There are promising 3rd party tools like Skedler (video summarises the problem perfectly) that seems to achieve the need, but I feel this should be a native feature by now, instead of setting up and managing another tool to set the report.
2 Likes
To be able to put a value inside the Donut “Pie” Chart - GitHub
Self-explanatory and someone was kind enough to submit a PR and just needs Grafana review.
2 Likes
What I often find lacking is the ability to enter variables in the thresholds.
I often have numerous panels that work with the same threshold values. Being able to change these in one place would be a real bonus for me.
5 Likes
Plot geojson data dynamically on geonap
Currently the only way to do GeoJSON im geomap is using file on disk
3 Likes
The bar chart could be more powerful. Group and stack bars within the group for example. Or indicators overlaid on top of bars per bar to indicate limits or statistics for example. We have two PRs open for this, but no reviews yet.
1 Like