Is a public dashboard supposed to automatically refresh (including any new panels) when saving?

Grafana
1

Hi,

I’m experimenting with using Grafana to show some data on a TV in an office, and I am using the external/public link functionality to do this. I am currently able to access my dashboard, but I am having trouble getting it to fully refresh after any changes.

I can see that the data in some panels is refreshing, but the problems I have are:

  1. if the admin user adds a new panel to the dashboard (or makes any other changes, like reorganisation), someone has to go and refresh the page at the external link viewer for it to show the new panel. The auto-refresh seems to work for data inside a plot, but not for the overall dashboard.

  2. I have a text/markdown panel that I want the admin to be able to update, and then the panel should update on the external link. However, this doesn’t seem to work - I need a full browser refresh to get this panel to update on the external viewer.

I’m running grafana through docker: Grafana v13.2.2 (1bea008f7e)

And the client is just chromium on a raspberry pi (running raspbian latest).

Is there some way I can force the dashboard to refresh when panels are modified or the save button is clicked on the dashboard?

Thanks.

2

Grafana’s dashboard refresh interval is intended to refresh the panel data, it does not guarantee that structural dashboard changes such as adding/rearranging panels or editing a Markdown panel, will cause the externally shared page to perform a full browser reload.

If you need the TV display to periodically pick up those changes, one workaround is to force a full page reload from the browser side. For example, you can use a simple wrapper page → 

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="300; url=YOUR_DASHBOARD_URL">

This reloads the dashboard every 5 minutes, so changes saved by the admin should be picked up without manually refreshing the Raspberry Pi’s browser.

Alternatively, you can use a browser/kiosk mechanism that periodically reloads the dashboard URL.