Table of contents

If your team monitors infrastructure, product, or business metrics in Grafana, getting that dashboard in front of people shouldn't mean a dedicated laptop plugged into a TV, a browser tab someone has to remember to refresh, or a screenshot that's out of date by lunchtime.

Fugo's Grafana Cloud app connects to your Grafana dashboard and keeps an up-to-date image of it on any screen you point it at - on-call metrics in the NOC, product KPIs in the office, uptime dashboards in the war room - with no manual refreshing and no separate device to maintain.

For the people looking at the screen: point the app at a dashboard once, and it just stays current. Fugo re-captures the dashboard each time it comes up in your playlist rotation, so what's on screen reflects what's in Grafana.

For IT and Grafana admins: the app doesn't need an interactive login session or OAuth authorization. Instead, it authenticates using a Grafana API key (a service account token) that you generate and paste in directly, and it renders the dashboard as an image using Grafana's own image-rendering service rather than loading a live, interactive dashboard in a browser. That means there's no browser-compatibility requirement on the signage player itself - see Requirements below.

The Grafana Cloud app is a Premium app, available on the Core and Enterprise plans only. (See pricing plans.)

Fugo's Grafana app works by calling Grafana's own image-rendering feature to generate a snapshot of your dashboard, so your Grafana instance needs image rendering enabled for this app to capture a screenshot.

Grafana previously offered this as an installable plugin, but that plugin is now deprecated and no longer updated. The current method is Grafana's standalone Image Renderer service, which runs alongside your Grafana instance (via Docker or a downloadable binary) and gets connected to it through a few lines in Grafana's own settings. See their setup instructions.

If your dashboard isn't rendering in Fugo, that's the first thing to check with whoever manages your Grafana instance: confirm image rendering is set up and reachable, using Grafana's current setup guide above rather than any older instructions that mention installing a rendering plugin.

You'll need a Grafana API key or service account token with at least Viewer permission on the dashboard you want to display. Fugo uses this key to authenticate its rendering requests against your Grafana instance - it's not a personal login, so we'd recommend creating a dedicated service account for this integration rather than using an individual's credentials.

The direct URL to the specific Grafana dashboard you want to display (the standard dashboard link you'd copy from your browser's address bar while viewing it in Grafana). Fugo converts this into a render request automatically - see Configuring your Grafana Cloud app settings below.

Everything you display on a screen is published through a playlist. There are two ways to get the Grafana Cloud app into a playlist:

Either way, you'll end up configuring the same Grafana Cloud settings and publishing from the same playlist. The Design Studio is just an optional detour for a custom layout. We'll walk through both options below.

1. Log into your Fugo account. If you don't have one yet, you can start your 14-day free trial here.

2. Open the Playlists page from the lefthand navigation panel. Then click Create Playlist.

3. This opens the playlist editor, which will walk you through four steps:

Content → Screens → Schedule → Preview.

You'll land on the Content step first.

4. Switch the source selector to Apps.

5. Either scroll or use the search bar to find the Grafana Cloud app and click its card.

If you plan to add more than one dashboard, you can click the app as many times as needed to create multiple instances of the app.

6. You'll see your app instance(s) added to your content list on the right.

7. In your content list, find the Grafana Cloud item and click its gear icon to open its settings.

8. Enter your dashboard URL and API key and configure the app as covered in Configuring your Grafana Cloud app settings below, then click Save.

9. Continue to Screens, Schedule, and Preview as covered in How to publish your playlist to a screen below.

1. Click Studio in the top navigation, then click Create or Get started to start a new design.

2. In the left-hand content menu, open the Apps tab.

3. Either scroll or use the search bar to find the Grafana Cloud app and click its card.

4. This will drop the app onto your canvas. Drag its resize handles to size and position it: full screen, or shrunk down to share the slide with other content.

5. With the app tile selected, click the purple cog icon in the contextual toolbar above it to open the Grafana Cloud app settings.

6. Enter your dashboard URL and API key and configure the app as covered in Configuring your Grafana Cloud app settings below, then click Save when you're done.

7. Customize the rest of the canvas as you like. You can do things like:

8. To add another slide with another dashboard, add another slide and instance of the Grafana Cloud app.

9. Name your design when you're done with it and click Save. Then click Back to Fugo to exit out of the Design Studio.

10. Go to the Playlists page and create (or open) a playlist.

11. In the Content step, switch the source selector to Studio, and select the design you just saved - it'll be added to your content list on the right, just like any other item.

12. Continue the steps through Screens, Schedule, and Preview as covered in How to publish your content to a screen below.

Whether you opened it from a playlist or from the Studio, the Grafana Cloud app settings work the same way. Unlike Fugo's other BI apps, there's no login step here at all - you connect by pasting in a dashboard URL and an API key directly.

The direct URL of the Grafana dashboard you want to display, copied from your browser's address bar while viewing that dashboard in Grafana. Fugo uses this to identify which dashboard to render - you don't need to modify the URL yourself; Fugo handles converting it into a render request behind the scenes.

Make sure you copy the URL directly from your browser's address bar, not from Grafana's own Share menu - the Share menu generates a different kind of link that won't work here:

A Grafana API key or service account token with Viewer access to the dashboard above. This is what authorizes Fugo's rendering requests, so if the key is later revoked or expires in Grafana, this app instance will stop updating until you paste in a new one. This field is masked like a password field, so re-open it if you ever need to confirm which key is in use.

If you don't already have a token, we recommend creating a dedicated Grafana service account for Fugo, scoped to Viewer access only:

The pixel dimensions Fugo requests when rendering your dashboard. Match these to (or scale them proportionally with) your screen's resolution for the sharpest result - the default is 1920 × 1080.

How long this slide displays before moving to the next slide, if it's part of a rotation.

This sets the maximum time Fugo will wait for your Grafana dashboard to fully render before capturing its screenshot - not how often the image updates (that happens automatically each time the app comes up in rotation; see How often will my dashboard refresh on screen? below).

The default is 60 minutes, which is intentionally generous, but if you have a data-heavy dashboard with lots of panels, increasing this value gives it more time to finish loading before Fugo takes the screenshot, which helps avoid capturing a partially rendered dashboard.

Click Save once you're happy with your settings.

Once your Grafana Cloud app (or a Studio design containing it) is in a playlist's content list:

1. In the Screens step, select one or more screens to publish to.
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Use the By Screen tab to pick specific screens or screen groups individually, or switch to the By Property tab to target any screen that has a matching custom property instead - for example, publishing to every screen tagged Location: Chicago or Department: Sales, without selecting each one by name.

2. In the Schedule step (optional), choose how this content should run:

3. Use Preview to check how it'll look on screen. All your playlist settings will be listed on the righthand panel for you to review.

4. Make sure to give your playlist a name, then click Save and Publish to push it live, or Save to keep it as a draft you can come back to.

Once configured and published to screen(s), there's no manual intervention needed to update your dashboard. Fugo automatically re-captures a fresh screenshot of your Grafana dashboard each time your app comes up within the content rotation, so what's on screen stays current without you needing to touch the settings again.

Start by confirming the Dashboard URL and API key are both entered correctly and that the API key hasn't been revoked or expired in Grafana. If the key is valid, double-check that it has at least Viewer permission on that specific dashboard - a key that's valid for your Grafana instance in general but not scoped to that dashboard will still fail to render it.

Heavier dashboards with lots of panels can take longer than the default render window to fully load. Try increasing the Refresh interval (mins) setting so Fugo waits longer before capturing the screenshot.

If you have several screens all requesting the same dashboard in quick succession, Grafana's rendering service can rate-limit the requests. If a dashboard stops updating and you suspect this is happening, try staggering playlist schedules across screens or increasing the slide duration so the same dashboard is requested less frequently.

Get in touch via the support chat inside the CMS, or email support@fugo.ai.

To get started, sign up for a 14-day free trial here: www.fugo.ai/app.