Support for playlist with templating variables

[costimuraru]

Let me give you a simple example:
We have a dashboard that has $HOST variable configured.
We have a graph that uses aws.$HOST.request.count
When looking at the dashboard we can select Host1, Host2 etc, displaying the appropriate metrics.
Now, it would be nice to turn this into a playlist so that every minute, grafana displays the metrics for each host.

Things get a bit more complicated when we have two or more filters. There are a bunch of combinations, some of which may not be of interest for the dashboard watcher.
For this reason, it would be nice to have a way to select a list of filter/variable combinations that are interesting for the user. The playlist would then cycle through these combinations and display the dashboard with the appropriate metrics.
It would also be nice to make it possible to select different combinations for the time range as well in a playlist (eg. last 6 hours, last 24hours and so on).

[torkelo]

@costimuraru very good suggestions!

[catacgc]

👍 will make the playlist feature so much more useful

[ghost]

👍 This feature is needed beucause you don't have that huge screen to put all you graphs there.

[mdfecioru]

👍 Indeed, this feature would be great for projects like ours where we have many dashboards that may be compacted in a single screen.

[torkelo]

This indeed sound very useful, but also pretty complex and time consuming to expose variable and time settings in the start playlist view (and implementing the logic to handle those settings and setup variables etc on dashboard load/cycle). So it will definitely be a feature too prioritize in the future but not something that can be squeezed in for v1.8

[costimuraru]

Thanks @torkelo and keep up the good work!

[mixomat]

👍 Would be great to have this feature

[rishid]

While this is in the dev queue -- is there anyway to specify the template variable in the url? I could at least use a browser extension to rotate through a bunch of urls for now.

[torkelo]

@rishid yes, using ?var-<variable_name>=value

[bbinet]

+1, I'm also very interested in this feature request

[languitar]

+1

[pip77]

+1

[magmax]

+1 With templating, this is a must.

[utkarshcmu]

PR coming very soon...

@costimuraru I have implemented playlist for one variable, now working on multi variable combinations. Implementation should be quick. Selecting different time range may be an upgrade feature on top of this. For this iteration, I am just doing template variable combinations playlist.

[costimuraru]

That's awesome, @utkarshcmu !

[utkarshcmu]

Here is the the PR - #2841 and some screenshots:

Go to "Templating" and now you should be able to see the brand new "Playlist" tab:

Click on Playlist tab and you should see the following screen with all the variables listed.

I selected 2 of the variables out of 3 and clicked on "Start". (The reason I selected 2 is because I want to play all the combinations of these 2 variables keeping the 3rd one fixed. Please Note: The fixed variables will get their default saved values).

Now you can see that I kept the first variable constant and a playlist will start with all the possible combinations of 2nd and 3rd variables.

Please provide feedback and changes if required.

[timgriffiths]

Awesome @utkarshcmu

[torkelo]

Nice work! not sure about having the playlist feature as a tab in the templating settings. There is already a playlist view, Building a playlist for a templated dashboard should be part of that view.

[utkarshcmu]

Agreed with @torkelo, I will make this a part of the playlist view. That makes more sense. :)

[utkarshcmu]

Playlist based on template variables can be triggered from the playlist view now. Following steps should be followed to start the playlist:

Click on Playlist:

You will see the following Playlist view with an additional option of choosing the playlist type:

Everything works same for the playlists based on dashboards.

Now for playlist based on template variables, you need to select "variables" from the dropdown menu:

Then you will search for dashboard for which you need to run the playlist based on its template variables and select it:

Once you select the dashboard, automatically the list of template variables will be show:

Now the next step is to select the template variables with which you want to run the playlist, and click on Start:

And here you go with the playlist based on template variables:

Let me know what do you guys think about this change in the playlist view.

[torkelo]

looks good

[mtanda]

+1

[evandro-portugal]

+1, any news about this feature @utkarshcmu ?

[cbozen]

+7

[holyslav]

+8

[tessagold]

+9

[malcolm061990]

🤞

[kiloreven]

+11

EDIT: In our case we want to grant multiple teams access to the same dashboard with variables specific to that team (on public displays). Being able to use playlists to do this rather than copying the entire dashboards would save us a lot of time and management overhead :D

[cedricengagor]

+12

[Mantrain]

+13

How is this still not a thing?

[chrisulbrich]

+14

I'm interested in this feature, too!

[Sharded]

I really don't mind if the UI is very plain.

You can already add multiple copies of the same dashboard to a playlist, so to make something quick and dirty you'd just need to add a button to those dashboards that have variables. It could then pop up a panel that allows you to set the values you want to choose for each of the variables.

Although ideally it'd be nice to run queries etc, you could get something basic running with a simple line of text - being able to specify 'machinenumber: 5;direction: "up";' would be enough to save a huge amount of time needlessly replicating dashboards that work much better with variables.

[g-clems]

+15

[celsolom]

+1

[RandomUser0815]

9 years later, and still not available :(

[JohnBolander]

@ryantxu I saw you worked with playlists last year and I was hoping you could reevaluate the priority and assign this ticket to a milestone given the large interest and time that it's been open. Thank you!

[sourabhsharma-cpi]

all we need is an option to run playlist by URL - and we are good.

[alegeay]

+16

[roewan]

+17

[yaroze]

+18

[Oler-XII]

+19

[lgarvey]

+20

[cellmechanic]

please.

[sourcehawk]

+21
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[fortram]

+41

[Lanpingner]

+42

[lgarvey]

+43

[Kamii]

+44