Dashboards

A dashboard is a page you build yourself to watch your fleet. Each dashboard is made of one or more named tabs, and each tab holds the widgets you arrange on it.

Dashboards live in the left sidebar. Until you create your first one the sidebar shows a single New Dashboard button; after that it lists your pinned dashboards, with Manage Dashboard underneath for everything else.

A widget queries data that has already been recorded. It never asks a device for anything. Building a widget does not cause a device to start sending — if the value never arrived, the widget is blank and nothing about the widget, the device, or the app looks wrong.

Everything else about widgets follows from this:

A widget can only show values that are still inside your data retention window. Setting a Time Range longer than retention shows a shorter window, not more data.
A widget reads device fields. If the field was never defined, the value was dropped on arrival and there is nothing to read.
Retain exists because of this rule — it holds the last known value for up to 30 days, for sensors that only report occasionally.

The one exception is the Trigger widget, which sends commands the other direction. See Triggers send commands back.

Create a dashboard

Click New Dashboard in the sidebar

Before you have created anything, this button is all the sidebar shows. Once you have dashboards, the same button moves inside Manage Dashboard — see Pin a dashboard.

Enter a name and click Save

A dashboard takes a name and nothing else. Name it after what you are watching — cold-storage, line-2-output — because this is the name you will pick from when you pin it.

A new dashboard arrives with one tab already in it, so you can add a widget straight away.

Open the dashboard and click Start Editing

There’s also a switch for editing dashboard on the top navbar.

You need to be in desktop mode in order to enter editing

Pick the type that matches what you are showing — a single reading, a chart over time, a gauge, a map, a button. The Widget reference describes all twelve.

Set different settings and save it

Nearly every widget takes the same four settings, whatever its type:

Data Source — a single device, or a whole bundle. The grouping you deploy with is the grouping you monitor with, so one widget can cover the fleet.
Field — which device field to read.
Aggregate — how to summarise the readings. Anything other than Latest also needs a Time Range.
Time Range — how far back to look, bounded by your retention window.

Each widget type adds its own settings on top of these. See the Widget reference for what each one needs.

Tabs

A dashboard is split into tabs, and each tab holds its own set of widgets. The name you give a tab is what appears on its label.

A new dashboard already has one tab, so you can ignore them entirely until a dashboard outgrows a single screen. When it does, add a tab per view — overview, power, diagnostics — rather than building a second dashboard.

Pin a dashboard

Pinning puts a dashboard in the left sidebar as a shortcut, and the most recently pinned dashboard is the one shown first. A company can have up to five pinned at a time.

Only pinned dashboards appear in the sidebar. Every other dashboard is reached through Manage Dashboard, the button underneath the pinned list. That is also where you pin and unpin, and where New Dashboard lives once you have created your first one.

Pinning is company-wide, not personal. A dashboard you pin appears in the sidebar for every employee in the company, and unpinning removes it for everyone.

Triggers send commands back

A Trigger widget is a button or switch that sends a command to a device — a shutdown signal, a reboot, a relay toggle. It is the only widget that writes rather than reads.

An employee with the User role can press a Trigger. Read-only governs whether someone can edit a dashboard, not whether they can act through one. A dashboard carrying a SHUTDOWN button gives that button to everyone who can see the dashboard — and pinning shows it to the whole company.

Turn on Require Confirmation when configuring a Trigger to put a confirmation prompt in front of the command.

A widget that is configured correctly and still shows nothing is the most common dashboard problem, and it follows directly from the rule at the top of this page. Check these in order:

The field has never received a value. Look at Device Events for the device. If nothing arrives there either, the app may be emitting an identifier with no matching field — in which case the value is dropped on arrival.
The device is Offline, or every device in the bundle is. Work through Troubleshooting.
The Time Range reaches past your retention window. Nothing older than retention exists to show.
The sensor reports rarely and Retain is off. Turn Retain on to hold the last known value.
The Data Source does not report that field. A device can be registered and healthy and still never send the field the widget is asking for.

Dashboards are safe to change

A dashboard is a view over data it does not own. Deleting a dashboard, deleting a tab, or removing a widget destroys no data — the recorded field values are untouched, and every other widget reading them keeps working.

Rearranging a dashboard is not a decision you need to be careful about. Deleting the field behind a widget is.

Dashboards do not notify you

A dashboard shows you what is happening while you are looking at it. To be told when something happens, use an alert — alerts are configured in the Blueprint Editor and can send a notification, an SMS, or an email.

Who can build dashboards

Creating, editing, and pinning dashboards requires the Owner or Admin role. Employees with the User role can view every dashboard and, as above, can still press a Trigger.