Publish dashboards

A published dashboard provides your viewers with quick access to a dashboard by skipping the process of entering credentials. Published dashboards are also a convenient way to display non-sensitive data that does not need authentication. You might also want to share your dashboard as a published dashboard to prevent the viewer from changing its contents.

Who can view a published dashboard

You can share a published dashboard with your viewers by providing them with a link to the dashboard. Viewers can be internal or external to your organization, and do not need login credentials to your Splunk instance to view a published dashboard.

A published dashboard is hosted on the Splunk instance that it was published on. Therefore, any access rules that apply to the Splunk instance, such as IP allowlists, firewalls, and VPN access, also apply to the published dashboard.

Prerequisites

To publish a dashboard, you must maintain the following prerequisite capabilities:

  • schedule_search
  • edit_published_dashboards

edit_published_dashboards applies to admins and sc_admins by default.

Check for prerequisite capabilities

You can check if you have the prerequisite capabilities by following these steps:

  1. Navigate to the Settings dropdown list.
  2. Under Users and Authentication, select Roles.
  3. Under the Name column, click the role you want to check.
  4. Select View Capabilities. The View Capabilities modal will pop up.
  5. In the search bar, filter for schedule_search or edit_published_dashboards.

Publish a dashboard

The following steps describe how to publish a dashboard:

  1. In the dashboard's View mode, navigate to the Actions dropdown list.
  2. Select Publish dashboard.
  3. In the Publish dashboard modal, do the following:
    1. The Data refresh schedule dropdown list, select how frequently you want the dashboard's data to update and the time of day you want the data to update. The following are options for the data refresh frequency:
      • Every hour
      • Every day
      • Every week
      • Every month
      • By Cron
    2. In the Link expiration dropdown list, select when you want the published dashboard to expire. The following are expiration options:
      • 24 hours
      • 7 days
      • 30 days
      • 1 year
      • Custom time
    3. Select Publish dashboard.
  4. Under Published link, copy the URL to share with your dashboard viewers.
  5. (Optional) Select View published dashboard to see the published state of your dashboard.
  6. Select Publish options.
  7. In the Publish dashboard modal, you can do the following:
    • Copy the published dashboard's URL for sharing.
    • Make changes to the refresh schedule.
    • Delete the published dashboard's URL. The only way to change the URL expiration is by selecting Delete published URL and restarting the publishing steps from the beginning.
  8. To keep the changes you've made for your published dashboard, select Save.
Note: Published dashboards automatically refresh whenever the scheduled search completes.

Find a published dashboard as an admin

An admin can find a published dashboard by doing the following:

  1. Go to Settings > Searches, reports, and alerts.

  2. Filter for _SnapshotView__<dashboard ID>. By default, the dashboard ID is the same as the dashboard title, unless it was edited when the dashboard was created.

Delete a published dashboard URL link

You can delete a published dashboard URL link by following these steps:

  1. In the dashboard's View mode, navigate to the Actions dropdown list.
  2. Select Publish dashboard.
  3. Select Delete published URL.
  4. Select Delete.

Limitations

  • A published dashboard does not support the following:
    • Events viewer workflow actions
    • Events viewer tags
    • Linking to a search
    • Linking to reports

    • Sorting by using the sort icon in table headers.

    • On-demand searches. You must schedule dashboard searches.

  • By default, no more than 3 concurrent searches can be run per dashboard.

  • When a published dashboard's data refreshes, searches run as the user who published the dashboard. Searches do not respect any Run as settings.

  • Searches that depend on inputs use the default value when they run on the specified schedule.

  • Inputs with tokens that change searches do not work when viewing the published dashboard. For example, an input does not re-run a search for a published dashboard. Inputs with tokens that do not change searches work, for example, if the input changes a visualization option.