Grafana Explorer URLs are often incredibly long because the query information is directly encoded within them. That’s why the “get shorten link” button is used so frequently. Then, we discovered that these links actually get deleted. Without warning, links previously used in documents silently expire.
What’s worse, this retention policy is completely invisible in the UI. There’s no prompt whatsoever when you generate a share link. You can only adjust this setting during the Grafana instance configuration.
Official Document about Shortened Link
Then we found this sentence:
QUOTE
A shortened link that is not accessed will automatically get deleted after a configurable period (defaulting to seven days). If a link is used at least once, it won’t be deleted.
This is clearly a deceptive pitfall! In my humble opinion, this is a prime example of the following scenario:
- “I know what I’m doing isn’t quite right, but it seems I don’t have a better solution in the short term (possibly due to technical reasons).”
- “I know users probably don’t want this behavior.”
- “So, I’ll do it quietly, without making a big fuss. I won’t put it in the UI. That way, people won’t notice it much, there won’t be too many discussions, and they won’t constantly demand this not-so-important but somewhat troublesome feature. As long as I’ve written it in the documentation, it’s your problem if you don’t see it – you can’t say I didn’t write it. But as long as the exposure is low enough, it won’t be a problem. Even though I know this approach will definitely cause trouble.”