Grafana Kiosk

A very useful feature of Grafana is the ability to display dashboards and playlists on a large TV.

This provides a utility to quickly standup a kiosk on devices like a Raspberry Pi or NUC.

The utitilty provides these options:

• login
  • to a Grafana server (local account)
  • to a grafana server with anonymous-mode enabled (same method used on https://play.grafana.org)
  • to a hosted grafana instance
• switch to kiosk or kiosk-tv mode
• display the default home page set for the user
• display a specified dashboard
• start a playlist immediately (inactive mode enable)

Additionally, an initialize option is provided to configure LXDE for Raspberry Pi Desktop.

Usage

--URL

• URL to a Grafana server

--playlist

• designates the URL as a playlist, allowing instant "inactive" user vs waiting for the timeout

--login-method (default anon)

• anon (anonymous)
• local (local user)
• gcom (Hosted Grafana)

--username used with local and gcom login methods

--password used with local and gcom login methods

--kiosk-mode

• full (no sidebar, top navigation disabled)
• tv (no sidebar, top navigation enabled)
• disabled (sidebar and top navigation enabled)

--autofit scales panels to fit the display (default is true)

• true
• false

--lxde enables initialization of LXDE

--lxde-home specifies home directory of LXDE user (default $HOME)

Hosted Grafana using grafana.com authentication

This will login to a Hosted Grafana instance and take the browser to the default dashboard in fullscreen kiosk mode:

./bin/grafana-kiosk --URL https://bkgann3.grafana.net --login-method gcom --user bkgann --password abc123 --kiosk-mode full

This will login to a Hosted Grafana instance and take the browser to a specific dashboard in tv kiosk mode:

./bin/grafana-kiosk --URL https://bkgann3.grafana.net/dashboard/db/sensu-summary --login-method gcom --user bkgann --password abc123 --kiosk-mode tv

This will login to a Hosted Grafana instance and take the browser to a playlist in fullscreen kiosk mode, and autofit the panels to fill the display.

./bin/grafana-kiosk --URL https://bkgann3.grafana.net/playlists/play/1 --login-method gcom --user bkgann --password abc123 --kiosk-mode full --playlist --autofit

Grafana Server with Local Accounts

This will login to a grafana server that uses local accounts:

./bin/grafana-kiosk --URL https://localhost:3000 --login-method local --user admin --password admin --kiosk-mode tv

./bin/grafana-kiosk --URL https://localhost:3000 --login-method local --user admin --password admin --kiosk-mode tv

Grafana Server with Anonymous access enabled

This will take the browser to the default dashboard on play.grafana.org in fullscreen kiosk mode (no login needed):

./bin/grafana-kiosk --URL https://play.grafana.org --login-method anon --kiosk-mode tv

This will take the browser to a playlist on play.grafana.org in fullscreen kiosk mode (no login needed):

./bin/grafana-kiosk --URL https://play.grafana.org/playlists/play/1 --login-method anon --kiosk-mode tv

Building

A Makefile is provided for building the utility.

make

This will generate executables in "bin" that can be run on a variety of platforms.

TODO

• Support for OAuth2 logins

References

• https://grafana.com/docs/guides/whats-new-in-v5-3/#tv-and-kiosk-mode
• https://grafana.com/docs/reference/playlist/