Share a custom dashboard

This document describes how to share with people or groups who are in your organization, the custom dashboards that are in your Google Cloud project. For example, when troubleshooting a problem, you might want a teammate to view a dashboard.

We recommend that you use Monitoring to send the URL of a dashboard to your recipients when you have that option. Monitoring identifies those recipients who might not have permission to view the dashboard and provides an option for you to grant the required permissions.

Best practice

To eliminate permission barriers when sharing dashboards, we recommend that a principal with an IAM role of Owner (roles/owner) for a Google Cloud project grant the role of Monitoring Viewer (roles/monitoring.viewer) to all people, groups, or domains who might need to view a dashboard stored in that Google Cloud project. For more information, see Grant access to Cloud Monitoring.

Before you begin

Identify your IAM role:

  1. In the navigation panel of the Google Cloud console, select IAM:

    Go to IAM

  2. Select the Google Cloud project.

    If you receive a permission-denied error, then you might not have an IAM role on the project, or your role isn't project-scoped. To view the IAM page, you must have a project-scoped IAM role. Project-scoped roles are the roles of Owner (roles/owner), Editor (roles/editor), and Viewer (roles/viewer).

Share a dashboard

When you are investigating a data anomaly, you might want another person or a group of people to view a custom dashboard. For example, you might see an expected drop, or spike, in a performance metric and you want to consult with a teammate. In this scenario, you want to share a dashboard with your teammate.

To share a dashboard do the following:

  1. In the navigation panel of the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring, and then select  Dashboards:

    Go to Dashboards

  2. Select a dashboard.

  3. Click Share and then use the following table to complete the dialog.

    Owner (roles/owner)

    1. Click Add people and groups and enter the names of the people or groups.
    2. Click Message and enter the information that you want included in the email. You don't need to include the URL of the dashboard.

    3. Optional: To have the dashboard display data for a specific time range, select Open dashboard at custom time range and then enter the start and end times.

      By default, the dashboard displays the most recent hour of data.

    4. Click Send.

      Monitoring evaluates whether the email recipients have permission to view the dashboard. Because Monitoring doesn't have access to the members of a group, those members might be identified as requiring permissions to view a dashboard.

      When all recipients have permission to view the dashboard, the recipients are sent an email that invites them to view your dashboard. The email includes your message and the URL of the dashboard.

    5. If a dialog opens that prompts you to grant access to a recipient, then Monitoring determined that a recipient might not have permission to view the dashboard.

      To grant the minimal permissions to view the dashboard, select the role of Monitoring viewer, and the click Send.

      Each recipient is sent an email that invites them to view your dashboard. The email includes your message and the URL of the dashboard.

    Editor (roles/editor)

    1. Click Add people and groups and enter the names of the people or groups.
    2. Click Message and enter the information that you want included in the email. You don't need to include the URL of the dashboard.

    3. Optional: To have the dashboard display data for a specific time range, select Open dashboard at custom time range and then enter the start and end times.

      By default, the dashboard displays the most recent hour of data.

    4. Click Send.

      Monitoring evaluates whether the email recipients have permission to view the dashboard. Because Monitoring doesn't have access to the members of a group, those members might be identified as requiring permissions to view a dashboard.

      When all recipients have permission to view the dashboard, the recipients are sent an email that invites them to view your dashboard. The email includes your message and the URL of the dashboard.

    5. If a dialog with the title "Someone might not have access" is shown, then Monitoring determined that a recipient might not have permission to view the dashboard. To continue with the share command, click Send, and then click OK.

      Each recipient is sent an email that invites them to view your dashboard. The email includes your message and the URL of the dashboard.

    Viewer (roles/viewer)

    1. Click Add people and groups and enter the names of the people or groups.
    2. Click Message and enter the information that you want included in the email. You don't need to include the URL of the dashboard.

    3. Optional: To have the dashboard display data for a specific time range, select Open dashboard at custom time range and then enter the start and end times.

      By default, the dashboard displays the most recent hour of data.

    4. Click Send.

      Monitoring evaluates whether the email recipients have permission to view the dashboard. Because Monitoring doesn't have access to the members of a group, those members might be identified as requiring permissions to view a dashboard.

      When all recipients have permission to view the dashboard, the recipients are sent an email that invites them to view your dashboard. The email includes your message and the URL of the dashboard.

    5. If a dialog with the title "Someone might not have access" is shown, then Monitoring determined that a recipient might not have permission to view the dashboard. To continue with the share command, click Send, and then click OK.

      Each recipient is sent an email that invites them to view your dashboard. The email includes your message and the URL of the dashboard.

    All other roles

    1. Click Add people and groups and enter the names of the people or groups.
    2. Click Message and enter the information that you want included in the email. You don't need to include the URL of the dashboard.

    3. Optional: To have the dashboard display data for a specific time range, select Open dashboard at custom time range and then enter the start and end times.

      By default, the dashboard displays the most recent hour of data.

    4. Click Send.

      Monitoring sends an email that invites the recipients to view your dashboard. The email includes your message and the URL of the dashboard.

Troubleshoot

This section describes how to resolve errors that might occur when sharing a dashboard.

Error message occurs when sharing a dashboard

Two different errors can occur when sharing a dashboard:

  • You have the Owner (roles/owner) role, but the share dialog displays the following error message:

    Unable to grant access to the following account due to organization configurations

    The policies of your organization prevent you from granting a principal a role. To resolve this error, contact your organization administrator.

  • You selected one or more recipients without an email address, the share dialog displays the following error message:

    Error: Email addresses and domains must be associated with an active Google Account, Google Workspace account, or Cloud Identity account.

    However, an email notification has been sent to all recipients with valid email addresses.

Shared dashboard can't be viewed

You are emailed a URL of the dashboard; however, when you access the URL you can't view the dashboard. Instead, you see the following message:

You do not have sufficient permissions to view this page

To resolve this situation, contact a project owner and ask them to grant you the Monitoring Viewer (roles/monitoring.viewer) role.

What's next