In New Relic, you can share dashboards and charts with viewers outside your organization, even if they don't have a New Relic account. This feature expands the audience for your insights while maintaining security controls and auditing capabilities. The shared dashboards and charts are accessible via publicly accessible live URLs that you create from the New Relic platform.
Imagine your company provides a critical backend service to a major business customer. During a service disruption, this customer needs timely and accurate status updates. Instead of sending periodic, static email updates, you can provide them with a direct, real-time view of the situation.
Your engineering team has a New Relic dashboard that monitors the health of the service, showing metrics like transaction throughput and error rates. When an issue arises, your account manager shares the URL of a specific chart showing the problem, or the secure, password-protected URL for the entire dashboard for a complete view, directly with the customer's technical lead.
By sharing the link, you give your customer a live, transparent view of the recovery process. They can see the metrics improve as your team deploys fixes, which reduces their need to request status updates and builds significant trust. The value is in the direct, secure sharing of the URL itself, providing a single source of truth during a critical event.
To add an extra layer of security to the shared content, you can enable password protection (only for dashboards). This ensures that only users with the URL and the password can access the shared content.
When external users access the shared dashboards or charts, the page renders with the same data and visualizations as the original entity, with the following interactive capabilities:
Time range: Viewers can pick the time range from a drop-down to see data for a specific period.
View mode: Viewers can select light or dark mode depending on their preference.
TV mode: Viewers can enable a full-screen TV mode that optimizes the dashboard for display on a television screen.
Important
While the chart sharing feature is available to Pro, Enterprise, and Core Compute customers, the dashboard sharing feature is available only to Pro and Enterprise customers with Advanced Compute enabled. To learn more about the associated costs and management practices for the dashboard sharing feature, refer to the Pricing section.
Prerequisites
This feature includes multiple security layers and conditions to ensure controlled and secure data sharing. To share dashboards or charts publicly, ensure the following setup is in place. Refer to the Security and access management page for setup details:
The Live URL control permission is enabled for all accounts sourcing the dashboard.
The custom role and permissions are configured for you to share dashboards and charts.
The accounts sourcing the dashboard or chart have grants for your role to share data externally.
You have access to all accounts sourcing the dashboard or chart.
You are the owner of the dashboard or chart you want to share.
You can share your dashboard by generating a live dashboard URL and managing its expiration duration. Additionally, you can enable password protection for enhanced security when sharing dashboards. You can also view the list of generated URLs with details and revoke them at any time from the New Relic platform. To ensure security and compliance, monitor the audit trail for creating, updating, or revoking shared dashboard URLs.
Prudence
If a shared dashboard is not password-protected, anyone with the live URL can access it and view all the information contained within it. To avoid unwanted access, enable password protection when creating the URL.
Conseil
You can create and manage live dashboard URLs through both the UI and the NerdGraph API.
To create a publicly accessible live URL for your dashboard:
Any content updates made to the actual dashboard on the New Relic platform are automatically reflected on the shared dashboard page. To prevent accidental data exposure, only the dashboard owner can update a publicly shared dashboard.
To update the live duration of the shared dashboard, you must have the necessary permissions, and you are the owner of the dashboard.
In the top-right corner, go to Share > Manage public link.
Update the duration from the Link expiration drop-down. The Never expires option keeps the URL live for 20 years.
Save your changes.
To enable or disable password protection for the live dashboard URL, you must have the necessary permissions, and you are the owner of the dashboard. If you are disabling password protection, the existing password is removed, and external users can access the dashboard without a password. If you are enabling password protection, share the generated password with the URL to allow external users to access the dashboard.
If you lose the password for the live dashboard URL, you can reset it. For resetting, you must have the necessary permissions, and you are the owner of the dashboard.
Open the password-protected dashboard you are sharing.
In the top-right corner, go to Share > Manage public link.
Turn on Reset password.
Click Save changes.
Copy the new password and save it for sharing with external users.
Passwords can not be retrieved later. If you lose it, you only have to reset it again. Follow our password management best practices to manage the password securely.
You can access shared dashboard names hyperlinked with their live URLs, all in one place on New Relic One. Depending on your permission, you can view either the URLs you have created or those created by all users in the account.
In the left navigation, click your name at the bottom.
Navigate to Administration > Shared Dashboards. The Shared Dashboards page provides a list of shared dashboards, including their creation and expiration dates, and the owner of each dashboard.
You can click the dashboard names to open the sharing pages in a new tab.
Share the live dashboard URL with external users to allow them to access the shared dashboard. If the URL is password-protected, also share the password with them. For the external users, following two security based controls are embedded with password-protected URLs:
Session-based access: After accessing the dashboard, the session remains active for 120 hours. If they try to access the dashboard after this period, or the browser session expires, they are prompted for the password. If there is a password reset, the session expires as soon as the widgets are refreshed. The external users need to enter the new password.
reCAPTCHA verification: If they have multiple failed attempts to access the dashboard, they need to complete a reCAPTCHA verification before entering the password again.
Pricing
When sharing live dashboard URLs, it's important to understand the associated costs and how to manage them effectively. Public Dashboards is an Advanced Compute Product feature offered as an add-on or as a part of the Compute pricing model. Advanced CCUs are consumed when queries are run from the dashboard visualizations, which happens in the following cases:
Depending on your permissions, you can revoke either the URLs you have created or those created by all users in the account. Deleting the dashboard automatically revokes the public sharing URL. If you restore the dashboard, you need to create a new live URL.
You can revoke the URLs in the following ways:
On the dashboard you are sharing, go to Share > Manage public link > in the Share dashboard dialog, click Revoke public link > Confirm the revocation.
From the Shared Dashboards page, go to the icon for the dashboard link > click Revoke > Confirm the revocation.
Creating, updating, or revoking shared dashboard URLs generates an audit trail in the NrAuditEvent. To view the records in the query builder:
Select the account from which the public dashboard URLs are created.
Run any of the following queries to view the audit trails:
To get the details of live dashboard URLs created or revoked in the last hour, run the following query:
FROM NrAuditEvent
SELECT*
WHERE actionIdentifier LIKE'%public_dashboard.%'
To get the details of live dashboard URLs created in the last hour, run the following query:
FROM NrAuditEvent
SELECT*
WHERE actionIdentifier LIKE'%public_dashboard.create%'
To get the details of live dashboard URLs revoked in the last hour, run the following query:
FROM NrAuditEvent
SELECT*
WHERE actionIdentifier LIKE'%public_dashboard.revoke%'
To get the details of live dashboard URLs created by a specific user in the last hour, replace <user_email> with the actual user email ID and run the following query:
FROM NrAuditEvent
SELECT*
WHERE actionIdentifier LIKE'%public_dashboard%'
AND actorType='user'
AND actorEmail=<user_email>
To get the details of live dashboard URLs created in an account in the last hour, replace <account_id> with the actual account ID and run the following query:
FROM NrAuditEvent
SELECT*
WHERE actionIdentifier LIKE'%public_dashboard%'
AND scopeType='account'
AND scopeId=<account_id>
To get the list of dashboards from which the live URLs are created in a specific time period, run the following query. It shows the number of URLs created for each dashboard.
Conseil
The following example query retrieves records from the last week. You can adjust the time period as needed.
WITH aparse(description,'%for dashboard *')AS dashboardGUID
FROM NrAuditEvent
SELECTcount(*)AS'dashboards'
WHERE actionIdentifier LIKE'%public_dashboard.create%'
FACET dashboardGUID
SINCE 1 week ago
To get the list of operations performed with the live dashboard URLs in a specific time period, run the following query.
Conseil
The following example query retrieves records from the last week. You can adjust the time period and the facet as needed.
WITH aparse(description,'%for dashboard *')AS dashboardGUID,
To manage public dashboard related pricing and password security efficiently, follow these best practices:
To keep your pricing optimal, consider the following standard practices:
Access control:
Manage who can create, edit, or delete URLs at both the account and user-role levels. This helps control and prevent users from having excessive access to these capabilities.
Link expiration management: Set expiration times for URLs to ensure they are only visible for a certain period, reducing potential overuse.
Widget management:
Add or remove widgets from your internal dashboard to optimize the data being queried.
Update widgets to ignore time picker changes, preventing additional queries when users adjust the time range.
Manage the refresh rate of each widget to prevent automatic refreshes, aligning with your internal dashboard preferences. For more details, refer to Customize chart refresh rates.
To ensure secure password management for live dashboard URLs, follow these best practices:
Secure Storage: Copy and securely store the generated password immediately after creating or resetting it. New Relic doesn't store or allow retrieval of the password after the initial display.
Sharing: Use secure methods to distribute the password to your intended audience, such as internal password managers, secure messaging, or one-time secret services. Avoid insecure channels like plain text email.
Complexity: Passwords are auto-generated in complex format to enhance security. Before protecting the URL with a password, ensure the complexity aligns with the audience's ability to handle the password.
Suspected Compromise: If you suspect the password has been compromised, either reset the password or revoke the live URL to prevent further access. If revoking the URL, create a new live URL and share it with the audience again. If resetting the password, share the new password with the audience.
Limitations
Following are the limitations of sharing dashboards publicly:
When viewing a shared dashboard in TV mode, it stays active for up to 72 hours. The viewer needs to refresh the browser to continue viewing.
If you are share a dashboard with widgets that use template variables, facet linking, custom visualizations, or log tables, these widgets will not display any information in the shared view.
If the dashboard's permission setting is Private, you can't share the dashboard publicly. To verify this, navigate to one.newrelic.com > Dashboards > Your dashboard > icon > Settings > Permissions.
Share your chart
To share a chart with external users, you must complete all the setups outlined in the Prerequisites.
Prudence
Anyone with the live chart URLs can view all the information from the chart. Share information carefully and in accordance with your company's internal policies and procedures.
Conseil
You can create and manage live chart URLs through both the UI and the NerdGraph API.