Hi all,
I am rather new to uberAgent and Splunk. Is there a way to schedule PDF reports that visualize a certain dashboard in a seperate PDF document? At the moment the "schedule a report" button is greyed out.
I already looked at support articles that claim it doesn't work because of date/time picker but I was wondering if one of Splunk's addons, for example PDF Smart Exporter is not able to do this.
Or am I missing something?
best regards,
Sven
Hi Sven,
You are right, scheduled PDF exports are not supported as our dashboards are forms which need some kind of input. Let us take the dashboard User Sessions as an example. The URL looks like https://Splunkserver:8000/en-US/app/uberAgent/session_user_detail followed by all the tokens which the dashboard expects: ?earliest=-1h&latest=now&form.FilterOperator=is&form.FilterExpression=*&form.FilterDatamodel=Session_SessionDetail_Users&form.Panel21Function1=sum&form.Panel22Function1=sum&form.Panel31Function1=avg&form.Panel32Function1=avg&form.Panel41Function1=avg
To achieve your goal you could either use a third-party add-on like PDF Smart Exporter or you could script the PDF generation yourself. I would prefer the latter because when using PDF Smart Exporter you would have to edit our dashboards. These changes will be overwritten on an update.
On Splunk Answers is a similar question and someone came up with a python script as a resolution to fill the tokens and then save the dashboard as a PDF file.
Hope that helps!
Sorry to resurrect this old thread.
I'm still struggling with reporting. Since PDF reports cannot be scheduled, we need to work with the built-in PDFGEN and REST API. I looked into the information that was by provided by you and discovered the Python script that a user made availaible through the Splunk forum. This script is quite complicated and is very prone to small errors or mistakes. The script is not complete and requires a bit of extra coding wich is quite difficult if you only have basic programming skills.
Are there other forms of reporting we can easily present to external customers? I guess the only way to make external customers look into our data is to give them access to Splunk?
Splunk is lacking a good dashboard export functionality, agreed. But we can't do anything about it.
It will be better with the new dashboarding technology, but that is far away.
I recommend hiring a consultant to write the Python script for you or to ask colleagues instead of giving access to external customers.
Hi Dominik,
Thank you for your response. Now I can make an informed decision on what to do about reporting. :)
Could you tell me why you would recommend still trying for the PDF script instead of giving access directly to Splunk?
We have uberAgent/Splunk set up in the multitenant setup described in the documentation. https://uberagent.com/docs/uberagent/latest/advanced-topics/multi-tenancy/ . This feature works pretty good together with uberAgent. Every tenant has its own index and his own set of data input streams coming in.
I could make users and roles that only gives acces to a specific index. Do you think that different tenants would still be able to see data of other tenants when I do this?
Hi Sven,
With your multi-tenancy setup in-place, giving your customers access to their index is fine. I thought you wanted to give 'some' external users access to your own Splunk instance.
With Splunk's user and role model, customers will only see their data.
Hi Dominik,
That is excellent news.
I think I'd rather spend my time giving my clients a dynamic dashboard experience than provide them with some static PDF's (with static old data).
Thank you again.