How to show live metrics on an office TV (no signage software)
Putting live metrics on an office TV sounds like a weekend project until you try it: signage software wants a subscription, a spreadsheet on a screen goes stale by lunch, and a hand-rolled dashboard becomes one more thing to maintain. It doesn't have to be any of that. All you actually need is a screen with a browser, a handful of numbers worth showing, and a way for those numbers to update themselves. Here's the whole setup, step by step.
Step 1: Pick a screen — almost anything works
A live metrics wall is just a web page shown full-screen, so the hardware bar is low. In rough order of convenience:
- A smart TV with a browser. Most office TVs already have one. Open the board's link, go full-screen, done.
- A TV plus a cheap stick or mini PC. A Chromecast, Fire TV Stick, or a €60 mini PC running a browser in kiosk mode gives you more control than most built-in TV browsers.
- A spare monitor or tablet. For a small team, a tablet propped up on a shelf is a perfectly good metrics wall.
Resolution matters less than you'd think — a well-designed display page scales its numbers to the screen. Position matters more: put it where people naturally look up, not in a hallway nobody lingers in.
Step 2: Decide what to show (fewer numbers than you think)
A screen read from five metres away holds four to six numbers, not forty. Pick a north-star metric, a couple of leading indicators the team can influence today, and one target so progress is visible. What that means concretely differs per team — a sales floor shows deals closed and % to quota, a support team shows open tickets and first-response time. We've collected examples per team on the use cases page, and if you're still deciding whether a metrics wall is right for your team at all, start with what a KPI wall display is.
Step 3: Make the numbers update themselves
This is the step that separates a metrics wall from a poster. If updating the screen takes a human, the screen is already out of date. The simplest reliable mechanism is a webhook per metric: each number on the wall has its own URL, and anything that knows the latest value posts it there. Three common ways to wire that up:
- From your own code. One HTTP POST wherever the value changes — after a sale is recorded, a signup completes, a ticket closes. It's a two-line addition to code you already have.
- From an automation tool. Zapier, Make, or n8n can watch Stripe, your CRM, or a form tool and forward new values to the webhook — no code at all.
- From a scheduled job. A cron job that queries your database every few minutes and posts the result is a fine answer for metrics that don't have a natural "event".
With Dashwall, every tile on a board comes with its own webhook URL out of the box. Post a value to it and every screen showing that board animates to the new number in under a second — the mechanics are on the how it works page.
Step 4: Go full-screen and keep it awake
Three small settings turn a browser tab into a proper wall display:
- Kiosk or full-screen mode, so there's no address bar or tabs — just the numbers.
- Disable sleep and screen savers on the TV or the device driving it. A metrics wall that's asleep half the day trains people to ignore it.
- Auto-start the browser on boot, pointed at the board's URL, so a power cut or a cleaner's unplugged cable fixes itself.
The pitfalls that kill metrics walls
Most metrics walls don't fail on hardware — they fail on habits. The three failure modes to design against: stale data (anything manually updated will eventually be wrong, which is worse than no wall at all), too many numbers (if a viewer has to squint or read a legend, it belongs in a BI tool, not on the wall), and no moments — a wall that only ever drifts is wallpaper within a month. Celebrate thresholds: a milestone animation when the team crosses a target is what keeps people glancing up.
Putting it together
Screen with a browser, four to six numbers, a webhook per metric, kiosk mode. That's the entire stack — no signage software, no media player, nothing new to maintain. Dashwall is launching soon: join the waitlist and you'll be able to put your first board on a TV the day you get access.