When you log in to the ThousandEyes platform, the first view that you see is the Dashboards page, containing charts and easy-to-read graphs summarizing your data. It provides dynamic and real-time insights into your network and application performance. This chapter guides you through the intricacies of ThousandEyes dashboards, helping you to harness the full potential of this essential feature.
As you enter the Dashboards page, you are greeted with live status dashboards, offering a snapshot of a specific time period (by default, 24 hours). Additionally, you have the capability to schedule and share point-in-time snapshots of a dashboard. You can organize the information derived from tests and Internet Insights into highly customized layouts. These layouts can be presented numerically, in tables, or through intuitive graphs, allowing for a comprehensive understanding of your network and application health.
A noteworthy feature of the Dashboards page is that it automatically refreshes every 2 minutes, ensuring you are consistently updated with the latest data. This not only facilitates active monitoring but also prevents automatic logouts due to inactivity. This attribute makes the Dashboards page suitable for deployment in kiosks or operations center displays.
This chapter introduces the various components, customization options, and strategies for effective utilization of ThousandEyes dashboards.
Dashboard Basics
When you log in to the ThousandEyes UI the Dashboard menu is the first page you see. By default, the dashboard uses the test data that has already been created to populate its visualizations.
As an example, Figures 5-1 and 5-2 show the defaults where the test data is represented in a basic dashboard view; we will look at how to customize for more granular specifics.
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Figure 5.1 Dashboard Defaults
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Figure 5.2 Dashboard Defaults Continued
When the tests shown in Figure 5-1 trigger alerts, the details of the alerts are displayed in the Alert List widget shown in Figure 5-2, including the alert rule that triggered the alert and the alert type.
You can quickly customize your Dashboards page by adding one or more of the built-in dashboards that ThousandEyes provides. From the Dashboard drop-down list, choose ThousandEyes Built-in, as shown in Figure 5-3, to see other built-in dashboards that might fit your needs. Notice that the dashboard categorizes the tests, so creating structure early on will help users operationalize and locate metrics more easily.
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Figure 5.3 Dashboard Built-ins
As an example, Figure 5-4 shows the HTTP Server built-in dashboard. You can see a completely different experience versus the other default dashboard. The point of this is to show examples of what metrics can be displayed and how layouts can be presented.
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Figure 5.4 HTTP Server Built-in Dashboard
To help you maneuver around the dashboard, Figure 5-5 provides a quick reference for the various functions in the dashboard.
The Add Widget button and ellipsis menu shown in Figure 5-5 are the typical starting points, respectively, for adding widgets to a dashboard and creating a new dashboard, or editing or deleting an existing dashboard. These controls enable administrators to organize specific data and structure it according to a particular use case. For example, grouping Agent to Agent tests that connect to the data center enables administrators to swiftly identify issues and generate high-level reports.
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Figure 5.5 Dashboard Built-in Controls