Creating Custom Dashboards

Custom Dashboards contain user selected Widgets, Composite Metrics and can be exported to PDF or also scheduled for e-mail delivery as a periodic report.

Overview

Custom Dashboards feature allows creation of multiple customized dashboards, generate reports and e-mail to users, and periodically generate reports on a scheduled basis, that can be either one time in future or on a recurring basis.

Key features include:

Custom Dashboards: Web page with user selected widgets, custom metric widgets, with time range selection
Report: PDF version of the dashboard export
E-Mail Report: PDF report generated to any user with e-mail address
Scheduled Report: Scheduled report can be of two types:
- One-time: Export the dashboard to PDF, store in my documents and email to users one time in future.
- Recurring: Export the dashboard to PDF, store in my documents and email to users on a recurring basis (Ex: Every 5th of the month, every 1st Monday of the month etc.)

These dashboards represent live data and time range filters allow viewing data for desired duration (ex: Week, Month etc.). All generated reports are also available in Documents section for later reference and archival purpose.

Create Dashboard

Step-1: Go to Custom Dashboards: Open Top Left Navigation Menu and Navigate to Administration > Manage Dashboards > Custom Dashboards

Step-2: Create Custom Dashboard.

Click on + Add button to create a new dashboard

Add Widgets to Dashboard

Select any widget/graph you would like to add to Custom Dashboard and click on top right

Adding a Metric Trend Graph

This Widget is now added to the Dashboard. Repeat the process to add any trend graph or tabular report to the Dashboard.

Adding a Donut Chart

Adding a Tabular Report

Following example shows how to Add Critical Alarms tabular widget to Dashboard

Click on the Donut chart slice and click on View Details

Repeat the process for other tabular report widgets.

Viewing Custom Dashboard

Go to Top Left Navigation > Dashboards
Launch desired Dashboard by clicking on Launch button

Clicking on the desired dashboard will open the dashboard and show data for the widgets that were added to the dashboard. In this case, open ‘Core Switches Health’ Dashboard

Adjusting Dashboard Layout

Dashboard Builder feature helps in changing the layout of the Dashboard to re-arrange widgets that are more relevant or meaningful to be at top/bottom or at one place.

Before adjusting layout

After adjusting layout

To adjust layout:

Navigate to Administration > Manage Dashboards > Custom Dashboards
Click on Dashboard name to Go to Dashboard Builder page
Click on Layout Settings > Select Fixed Layout
Change Size/Order of Widgets by dragging/re-sizing the widgets

Creating New Composite Metric Graph

Composite metric graph is an advanced trend graph which consists of multiple trend lines, typically from multiple devices. This feature allows users to create graphs to address more complex scenarios. Few examples include:

Availability trend graph of 5 core switches in one composite graph
Interface-out utilization trend on 5 WAN circuits
CPU utilization trend of 2x web servers, 2x app servers, 1x DB server
More …

Note: Currently the feature limits adding up to 5 trend lines in composite graph

Following is an example of composite graph that shows Interface-out utilization of two switches

Fig: Example of Memory / CPU Utilization for Two Switches

To create Composite Metric

Open Dashboard Builder

Click on ‘Create Metrics’

Click on Select the Customer

Select desired Assets. In this example, we will select 3 switches from our Prod environment.

You can search for desired assets based on name or using filter criteria.

Select desired Metrics. In this example, we will select Availability metric

Select Components if any. In this case, simply skip Components as it is not applicable for Availability metric. However, if you selected CPU or Memory type of metric, you would see selection for Overall CPU, CPU-0, CPU-1 etc.