Skip to main content

Overview

Rootly can email a dashboard on a schedule. A weekly reliability summary to engineering leadership, a Friday snapshot of on-call load to team leads — sent without anyone remembering to send it. There is no separate scheduling screen for this. Reports are built as a workflow, using the Send Dashboard Report action, which means everything workflows can do about timing and conditions applies here too.

What You Get

Email is the only delivery channel — there is no Slack destination for a scheduled report. If your team lives in Slack, the honest options are to email a channel address if your workspace supports one, or to build a workflow that posts a link to the dashboard instead of a snapshot of it.

Building One

1

Build the dashboard first

The report is a snapshot of a dashboard as it stands, so get the dashboard right before you schedule it. See Managing Dashboards.
2

Create a standalone workflow

A report is not reacting to an incident, so it belongs in a standalone workflow rather than one triggered by incident events.
3

Add the Send Dashboard Report action

Configure its fields:
array
required
Which dashboards to send. More than one can go in a single email, each as its own PDF attachment.
string
required
The sender address recipients see.
list
required
The primary recipients. Required — the action will not save without at least one address.
list
Additional recipients.
list
Recipients hidden from the others. Use this for a distribution list you do not want reproduced in every reply-all.
string
required
The email subject line.
string
Preview text that many email clients show next to the subject.
string
The email body that goes with the attachments. Supports Markdown.
4

Test it before you schedule it

Set To to your own address and leave the repeat off, then run the workflow manually and read what arrives. A dashboard that reads well on screen does not always survive being flattened to PDF — every chart is drawn at one fixed size, so dense panels get cramped. Adjust the dashboard, not the report.Do this before you turn the repeat on.
5

Set the cadence

Use the workflow’s scheduling controls to set how often it repeats. See Wait and Repeat. A standalone workflow repeats only when Repeat every is set and at least one Repeat on day is selected.
A standalone workflow never starts its own first run, but repeats count from its most recent run — including the test run from the previous step. Once the repeat is on, the next report goes out as soon as one interval has passed since that run, on a selected day, with no further manual run. Point To at the real recipients only when you are ready for the cadence to begin.
Repeat every offers 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, and 5 days, or a custom duration of 10 minutes or more, such as 7 days. Repeat on limits sends to the selected days, in your organization’s time zone. There is no send-time control: each report goes out one interval after the previous run, so a report that must arrive at a specific hour is not something this can promise.

Email Body

Use the Body to tell recipients what the dashboard contains and why it matters to them. For example, say which date range the charts cover and who to contact with questions. Keep it general enough to stay accurate on every send.

Limits Worth Knowing

  • The snapshot is taken when the workflow runs. Recipients see the dashboard as of send time, not as of when they open the mail.
  • Filters are the dashboard’s own. A report cannot narrow a dashboard on the way out — if leadership needs a different cut from the one the team uses, that is a second dashboard.
  • There is no per-recipient view. Everyone on the email gets the same PDF, regardless of what each of them could see in Rootly.

Managing Dashboards

Creating, sharing, and setting up the dashboard a report sends.

Standalone Workflows

Workflows that run on a schedule rather than on an incident event.

Wait and Repeat

The scheduling controls that set a report’s cadence.