Top Tools to Auto-Refresh and Iterate Dashboards

Keeping dashboards fresh on a second screen comes down to two jobs: reloading pages and moving between them. Here are tools for each. Disclosure: the first is made by Patrick Bushe, who runs this site.

#1. AutoBrowser by Patrick Bushe

A free extension that cycles a bookmark folder in one tab.

• What it does: put your dashboards in a bookmark folder, set the time per page (1 second to 5 minutes), and it moves through them in a loop. Each page loads fresh when its turn comes, and dead links are skipped.
• The trade-off: slow dashboards spend part of their turn loading, and pages that take more than 30 seconds are skipped as broken.

See AutoBrowser.

#2. Auto-refresh extensions

These reload one or more open tabs on a timer.

• The trade-off: they refresh but don't move between pages, so you still switch tabs yourself.

#3. The dashboard's own auto-refresh

Most dashboard tools, including Grafana, can refresh their own data every few seconds or minutes without reloading the page.

• The trade-off: it keeps one dashboard current but doesn't rotate between tools.

#4. Grafana playlists

Grafana can cycle through a list of its dashboards on a timer, in a kiosk view.

• The trade-off: Grafana dashboards only.

#5. Playwright or Selenium

Coding tools that can drive a browser through any sequence of pages, sign-ins included.

• The trade-off: you have to write and maintain code, which is a lot for rotating a few pages.

The verdict: Let each dashboard refresh its own data, and use AutoBrowser to move between them. If they're all in one tool, its playlist feature does both.

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