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Fugo's Grafana app lets you display a live Grafana dashboard on your digital signage screens without leaving a browser tab open and logged in on a device near your screen.

Instead of streaming your dashboard from an open, signed-in browser session, Fugo signs in to Grafana on a schedule using credentials you provide once, captures an up-to-date screenshot of your dashboard, and displays that image on screen like any other piece of content. Your credentials and any secret key are encrypted and stored securely, and you control how often Fugo refreshes the screenshot.

Before you connect your dashboard, a couple of recommendations that apply whenever you're connecting any third-party dashboard service to Fugo:

Create a dedicated, least-privileged (read-only where possible) Grafana account for Fugo to use, rather than an individual employee's login. This avoids interruptions from unexpected logouts, security alerts, or phone-number-linked recovery prompts, and limits what Fugo can access in your Grafana instance.

You can find instructions for setting up a dedicated service account with Google Workspace here.

You'll need the URL of the specific Grafana dashboard you want to display. Open it in Grafana, copy the URL, and keep it handy for the setup steps below.

When you connect a Grafana dashboard, Fugo checks that your URL contains the word "grafana" somewhere in it before letting you continue. You'll then choose how Fugo should sign in. Grafana currently supports two sign-in methods:

Fugo signs in directly with your Grafana username and password. No secret key is needed for this option.

If your organization uses Okta for single sign-on into Grafana, choose this option and Fugo will follow Okta's sign-in flow before landing back in Grafana.

A Secret Key is the same kind of alphanumeric seed value an authenticator app (like Google Authenticator or Authy) uses to generate a time-based one-time code (TOTP). You only need one if you sign in through Okta – if you sign in directly with your Grafana username and password, skip this section.

Get your secret key from Okta here: How to retrieve your Secret Key from Okta.

With your secret key ready (if you need one), you're ready to connect your dashboard in Fugo.

1. Log in to your Fugo account. If you don't have one yet, start your free trial at www.fugo.ai/app.

2. Go to Dashboards in the left-hand navigation, then click Create Dashboard.

3. Under Browse dashboards, select the Grafana tile (or Custom URL – see the callout above).

4. Enter the URL of your specific Grafana dashboard.

5. Choose your authentication method: Sign in with Grafana or Sign in with Okta.

6. Enter your username and password, plus your secret key if you're using Okta.

7. Click Create dashboard.

8. This opens the dashboard editor. In the background, Fugo uses your URL and credentials to sign in and capture a screenshot – this can take a minute or two. You can close the editor and come back later, or configure settings while you wait (see Edit your dashboard – advanced settings below).

9. Give your dashboard a name – you'll need one to save it.

10. Once saved, your dashboard appears in your Dashboards library with a default refresh interval of once per day.

By default, Fugo signs in to your Grafana dashboard and captures its screenshot from Fugo's own cloud servers. That works fine for Grafana Cloud or any self-hosted instance that's reachable from the public internet – but a lot of Grafana deployments we see aren't. If your Grafana instance sits behind a firewall, on a VPN, or on an internal network with no public URL, Fugo's cloud renderer simply can't reach it to take a screenshot, no matter how correct your credentials are.

This is genuinely one of the most common ways people run Grafana with Fugo, so it's worth setting up properly rather than working around it. Every dashboard has an On-Premise tab in its settings with two options for moving where Fugo runs the sign-in/capture steps:

Run the sign-in/capture process on your own server infrastructure instead of Fugo's cloud. This requires installing the Fugo TV Dashboards Control Center app on a server that can reach your Grafana instance (for example, a server on the same internal network or VPN), then entering that server's Local IP, Remote IP, and Public Key into the dashboard's On-Premise tab.

If you don't want to dedicate a server to this, turn on Use player for running steps instead. This runs the sign-in/capture process directly on the player device connected to your screen, as long as that player is on the same network as your Grafana instance – no separate server or Control Center app required.

Because the player is already doing the work locally, Local Player mode also unlocks Streaming: instead of capturing a periodic static screenshot, the player keeps your Grafana dashboard open and streams the live view straight to the screen. This is a particularly good fit for Grafana specifically, since it avoids stale-looking data between refresh intervals on a dashboard that's often updating in near real time. Streaming currently requires a Windows player device.

One thing to keep in mind either way: whichever machine ends up doing the rendering (the on-premise server or the player itself) needs to be able to actually reach your Grafana instance over the network – Fugo doesn't tunnel through firewalls on its own, it just moves where the capture happens to somewhere that already has a route in.

Not every dashboard is "screen ready" as-is – some are long, dense, or have small elements that are hard to read from a distance.

Add your saved dashboard to a Design Studio canvas to crop it down to just the chart or panel you need, and combine it with other apps, text, or media on the same slide. Open (or start) a Studio design, find your dashboard under the Dashboards panel, and drag it onto the canvas.

From there you can crop, resize, and combine it with other elements, then publish the design to a playlist the same way described below.

👉 Learn how in our Design Studio overview

A dashboard isn't published directly from the editor or your library. Instead:

1. Open (or create) a playlist, and add your dashboard to it as a content item.

2. Target that playlist to the screen(s) you want it to appear on.

3. Publish the playlist.

The same dashboard can be reused across multiple playlists and screens – updating and saving it updates everywhere it's used, so you don't need to republish each screen individually.

👉 Learn how in our Playlists overview

Clicking your dashboard in the library opens the dashboard editor, where you can adjust the Refresh Interval (how often Fugo re-captures your dashboard), resolution, and other capture settings, and choose whether Fugo runs the sign-in/capture steps in the cloud, on your own on-premise server, or on the player device itself.

These settings work the same way for every dashboard type.

👉 See the full breakdown – including Resolution, Pause duration, Memory, Proxy region, and On-Premise/Local Player options – in our Dashboards Overview.

If you run into trouble setting up or troubleshooting your Grafana dashboard, reach out to us any time: