Following up on my previous post about running Grafana out to a Chromecast dongle on a TV, I’ve now tested it going directly to a Vizio 4k TV with the built in Chromecast functionality. Looks like it works fine and is actually pretty responsive. Unfortunately, it appears to be displaying in 1080P. I haven’t tested this much, so it might be possible to push it to 4k.

This is the tool I’m using on the server side: https://mrothenbuecher.github.io/Chromecast-Kiosk/

This opens up the possibility to use smaller, low end TVs for Grafana directly, but also for other signage or metrics displays. One reason I’ve been interested in this for a while was to run displays in a service desk/call center environment. Previously, you had to run video from dedicated PCs that would run a couple hundred dollars. With this solution you only need to buy a TV that has Chromecast built in and then run the Kiosk program on a Ubuntu VM. You can then have multiple different feeds running to different TVs.

I think the Chromecast implementation might still be a little finicky with picking a resolution, but it should be consistent across the same model of TV.