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Scheduled deliveries

Scheduled deliveries let you send a dashboard or saved chart, and their results to people via email or Slack - even to people who don't have an account in your Lightdash instance.

If your Lightdash organization has email or Slack set up, you can create or select an existing saved chart or dashboard, add a scheduled delivery to it, and tell Lightdash when you’d like the send out your update. You can set up as many scheduled deliveries to a saved chart or dashboard as you like, and if you make any changes to the content, Lightdash will update the scheduled deliveries the next time they’re sent.

If you are running Lightdash on self-host, make sure you have the headless browser to generate images.

Enabling scheduled deliveries​

To use scheduled deliveries, an organization admin needs to have set up Slack or email for your Lightdash instance.

To set up Slack, see setting up Slack. If you're not on a self-hosted instance (e.g. Cloud or Enterprise), then your instance comes with an email server already set up, so you don't need to do anything to enable email deliveries. If you're on a self-hosted instance, see setting up email to configure a Lightdash email client.

Creating a scheduled delivery​

Only users with admin or edit access can create scheduled deliveries. To create a scheduled delivery, click on the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of your chart or dashboard, then click on scheduled deliveries.

You'll get a modal that pops up and shows you the list of existing scheduled deliveries for your saved chart or dashboard, and gives you the option to create new.

If you click on create new, you'll be brought to a configuration screen for your new scheduled delivery.

Scheduled delivery options​

  • Name: this is the name of your scheduled delivery.
  • Frequency: this is how often your scheduled delivery will be sent. You can make this hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or custom - each frequency has its own options. For example, with a monthly schedule, you set the day of the month and the time that you want your scheduled delivery to be sent. The custom frequency lets you write out your own custom Cron expression if you need something more specific than our standard options. All times for the scheduler are in UTC.
  • Format: either Image or CSV. Image sends an image of the content (chart or dashboard) to your chosen destination. CSV sends a downloadable .csv file of the results table from your chart, or if you're sending a dashboard, it sends a single message with multiple .csv files for the results tables from each of your charts.
    • For CSV formats: you can set the values to either be raw (we remove the formatting applied dates, numbers, or other fields in Lightdash) or formatted (the way the values appear in your table in Lightdash is how they'll appear in the .csv). You can also adjust the limit and specify the number of rows that you want to be delivered in your .csv. Results in table will deliver the number of results that are currently in the results table for your charts. You can also set a custom number of rows to be delivered using custom, or set all results to be delivered so there's no maximum row limit for each chart using all results.
    • Limit on CSV format: We limit CSV downloads to 100,000 cells by default, so if you are trying to download more cells, your file will get truncated.
  • Send to: here, you can pick if you want to send your scheduled delivery to Slack, email, or both. You can add as many Slack channels and email addresses as you'd like to here. You can send a scheduled delivery to a person in Slack using @persons-name or to a channel using #channel-name.

Once you've set up all of your delivery options, you can click create new to create your new scheduled delivery.

Editing and deleting your scheduled deliveries​

To remove a scheduled delivery from a chart or dashboard, click on the three-dot-menu beside the scheduled delivery name. From there, you can choose to edit or delete the scheduled delivery.