Rotate Grafana Dashboards on a TV

Grafana playlists or FreeTabSwitcher?

Grafana has its own playlists, which rotate Grafana dashboards. If everything on the screen lives in one Grafana instance, they're a good fit. FreeTabSwitcher helps when:

• The screen mixes Grafana with other tools: a status page, an incident queue, a sales board.
• Different dashboards need different time on screen (Pro).
• One PC drives several TVs, each with its own rotation (Pro).
• The screen has to come back by itself after a restart (Pro).

Set it up in five minutes (free)

1. Install FreeTabSwitcher from the Chrome Web Store.
2. Open each dashboard in its own tab, in one Chrome window. Add ?kiosk to each Grafana address (or &kiosk if it already has a ?) to hide Grafana's menus.
3. Click the FreeTabSwitcher icon, set the interval (60 seconds is a good start) and click ▶ Start.
4. Press F11 to make the window fullscreen.
5. Turn on Auto-start when browser opens, so rotation picks up again whenever Chrome restarts.

Tips for Grafana screens

• Let Grafana refresh its panels. Set the dashboard's own refresh interval (for example 1m) and leave FreeTabSwitcher's refresh off for those tabs. Reloading the whole page every switch is slower and flickers.
• Use relative time ranges such as "Last 6 hours", so the screen never shows a stale window of time.
• Sign the TV in with a viewer account that can only see what belongs on the wall.
• Skip tabs you don't want shown under Configure… → Skip specific tabs when cycling, so an admin tab never reaches the screen.

Make it unattended with Pro

A Pro playlist holds your dashboard addresses with a display time for each: 60 seconds on the overview, 15 on the error rates. It opens in its own window on the monitor you choose, goes fullscreen, and relaunches by itself whenever Chrome starts.

Pro arrives with version 2.1 as a one-time $19.99 upgrade. Everything else on this page is free. See what Pro adds.

Questions

Does it work with Grafana Cloud?

Yes. Anything that opens in a Chrome tab works, including Grafana Cloud and self-hosted Grafana.

Will the TV stay signed in to Grafana?

FreeTabSwitcher doesn't handle sign-in. Grafana keeps the session according to its own settings; if the session expires, the tab shows the login page until someone signs in again.

How many dashboards can it rotate?

As many as you have tabs. Most wallboards use three to eight; beyond that, people stop reading them.