Export Dashboards to PDF with Sideview Utils

[tradez]

Hello,

I am absolutely loving Sideview! However, and i am shocked i can't find anyone else looking to do this, I can't find a way to even print a page to PDF and have it save? FlashCharts don't even show up.

Are there any modules or best practices I can use if I want to build a dashboard that can be exported to people in the form of PDF?

[tradez]

Update here, once we started customizing CSS with the help of google, we were able to make spectacular dynamic reports with Sideview. Custom fonts, space, margins, everything all now work beautifully within Chome print to PDF and gone are the days of the woeful "PDF Renderer" from splunk.

Multiplexer improvements in the latest version also opened up a whole new world of dynamic nature by allowing us to have a static "Overall" section, and then have specific "Per Asset" dynamic pages towards the bottom which were fed by an SPL generated list. Be careful here though to | head X any queries that feed these and to not make the multiplexed code too in depth or you will choke the system.

Another good note here is to hang a "NullModule" off the multi-plex which you can then string objects off of to have a multi-faceted page get looped.

[sideview]

These are great points and I'll take a pass through the Multiplexer docs to make sure they're in there and/or prominent enough. Also as an alternative to always throwing a | head 10 on there, you can also put a Pager module upstream from the Multiplexer. It's not something that would occur to a person, but the Multiplexer will work with the Pager, so you can actually multiplex thousands of, er, things, but thus ensure that the user can only see N of them per page, ie N at a time.

[tradez]

Nice to know on the pager! For my project it was a static document we wanted to output, so i had to not use pagers for anything.

[responsys_cm]

Is there a way to use a multiplexer and table module and have the results exported to CSV and emailed?

[sideview]

Well that sounds to me like asking a UI to do a non-UI task. Why not have the same reports scheduled and have as an action that the results be emailed via csv. And btw the analogue of Multiplexer over in SPL is the map command.
EDIT: although I should say that in MOST cases, the use of map can then be refactored out, and you can do the same end results MUCH more efficiently just with stats and other more core search commands.

[responsys_cm]

Yeah... something like this looks like the solution:

http://blogs.splunk.com/2013/09/15/exporting-large-results-sets-to-csv/

[sideview]

If you want a Sideview UI dashboard to be printable to PDF, the key thing to do is to build it using Splunk's JSChart module instead of their FlashChart module.

This will allow you to manually print-to-pdf, but you still wont be able to automate or schedule the creation of the pdf.

You may also notice some idiosyncracies with other modules when you print to pdf. Some of these are cases where the modules are trying not to display information that they feel is relevant to the web only, but you may find bugs in legacy Splunk modules or even Sideview modules.

I'm glad that you like it. Thanks for the great question.

PS. Sometime in the next few releases Sideview Utils will have its own "Chart" module which will quickly supercede both JSChart and FlashChart so subscribe to the mailing list and watch out for that module when it comes. Technically I'm currently working on superceding all Splunk modules as well as all remaining advanced XML code and dependencies.

[responsys_cm]

Nick... one thing I would love to see is the ability to pick a dropdown or checkbox menu on a dashboard and have Splunk iterate through the values and generate a PDF report for each value and email it.

[sideview]

Sort of like, if you manually replaced that (presumably dynamic) Pulldown or CheckboxPulldown or Checkboxes module with a Multiplexer, how the Multiplexer would just clone out one sub-branch of UI config for each of the options. If you manually do that (make a copy of the view, swap out the dynamic form element with a Multiplexer) and hit print, how close is it?

[responsys_cm]

Yikes... no idea. I've never used the multiplexer module before... I'll read about it and experiment some...