Creating a New Dashboard
Creating a dashboard in ThousandEyes is as straightforward as adding a widget to a built-in dashboard. To effectively use dashboards, it’s essential to understand the different widget types and the data they display. This ensures that the relevant metrics are visualized in a way that best supports your monitoring needs.
From the dashboard, click the New button and choose Dashboard (see Figure 5-7) to create a new dashboard and add widgets to it.
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Figure 5.7 Create New Dashboard Menu Selection
In the Create New Dashboard dialog box that opens, shown in Figure 5-8, give the dashboard an intuitive name and choose which account group(s) will be able to view the dashboard. In the View Settings, you can check Set As Private if you don’t want anyone else to be able to view the dashboard, or you can check Set As My Default or Set As Default for Account Group if you want this dashboard to be displayed by default on your own Dashboards page or the account group’s Dashboards page, respectively. Click Create Dashboard to create the shell dashboard and return to the Dashboards page to configure it with widgets.
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Figure 5.8 Dashboard Creation
On the Dashboards page, locate your new dashboard and click its Add Widget button to open the Add a Widget panel (refer to Figure 5-6). Click a widget to open a separate panel in which to configure it. As an example, Figure 5-9 shows the panel that opens when adding the Color Grid widget (Data Summary type). When creating a new widget, all the options can seem overwhelming. Focus on how you want the data to look, and experiment with the various widgets to find what suits you (click Cancel instead of Save to return to the Add a Widget panel and choose a different widget to view).
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Figure 5.9 New Dashboard Widget
Step 1. Data Source: Select a data source from the Data Source drop-down menu. Most users may use the default option, Cloud & Enterprise Agents, but it’s crucial to consider other options, such as Internet Insights or Endpoint Agents.
Step 2. Category: Choose the category. Specify what aspect or metric you want to monitor from the selected data source. For example, if you have chosen Cloud & Enterprise Agents as your data source, you might select Web - HTTP Server as the category to display metrics related to HTTP server performance.
Step 3. Metric: Select the specific metric you want to monitor. You have several options to choose from, including Availability, DNS Time, or SSL Time. For the purposes of this example, let’s select Availability as the metric.
Step 4. Measure: After selecting the metric, you’ll need to determine how you want to measure it by choosing an option from the Measure drop-down list. The options include Median, Maximum, and Minimum.
Step 5. Cards: Select Tests from the Cards field drop-down menu. If you are using categories, use the Group Cards By field to organize them accordingly. This helps in sorting and grouping specific tests or agents. Although not covered in previous chapters, labeling enables users to group specific tests or agents together. For this example, choose All to include all relevant tests or agents.
Step 6. Set up filters: Scroll down to the Filter By section (this section is not shown in Figure 5-9) and select Tests to filter the data. If you have numerous agents worldwide running those tests and want to focus on specific agents, add additional filters to define your data more precisely.
Step 7. Save and view the data: Click Save to apply the data and the layout to your new widget. Figure 5-10 shows the example Color Grid widget. There are additional widgets you can include: Add Agent Status and Endpoint Agents represent Real-Time Agent Status and End User Experience status in the dashboard (see Figure 5-11).
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Figure 5.10 New Widget
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Figure 5.11 Agent Widget Example
Creating a dashboard allows your imagination to come alive and paint the picture of the network from many perspectives. Dashboards are fully customizable and can be created for a single use case if needed.
Another great feature of widgets is that you can duplicate a widget, change a metric or two (for example), and save the duplicate as a new widget. That way, you don’t have to go through the entire process of creating a new widget every time you need one.
The Embed Widget feature, shown in Figures 5-12 and 5-13, allows you to grab the data and use it as an iframe to insert in a web page, wiki page, or anything external that can use an iframe.
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Figure 5.12 Widget Features
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Figure 5.13 Iframe Widget
Returning to the dashboard widgets, if you encounter errors or issues, you can click on the widget to identify which test(s) are experiencing problems (see Figure 5-14). When you click on the widget, a window will appear to show all tests that are associated within that widget. In the next chapter, we explore how to monitor and troubleshoot network performance issues.
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Figure 5.14 Associated Test to Widget