Creating Dashboards¶

Dashboards are a convenient way to visualize important data in one place. Observe provides a quick and easy method of creating Dashboards from your datasets.

Dashboard Listing¶

Logging into Observe, and clicking Dashboards, displays a list of all available Dashboards on your instance. Recently viewed dashboards are listed at the top, and common filters are on the left. In the Search bar, you can enter filters to narrow your search to a specific dashboard or dashboards.

Creating a New Dashboard¶

There are several ways to create a new dashboard:

Use the New dashboard button on the Listing page
Duplicate an existing dashboard
Open an existing dashboard and click Save as New
From a Worksheet or Explorer, use Add to Dashboard and select New

Using Weather Tutorial data¶

For example, create a new Dashboard for the Dataset, Resource Set, and Metrics that you created as part of the Weather Tutorial. You created a Dataset, Weather Events, a Resource Set, Locations, and a Metrics set, Weather Metrics which you can add to a central Dashboard. Use the following steps to create your Weather Dashboard:

From the Dashboards interface, click New Dashboard.
Click Add Card, and then select Dataset Visualization.
Select Weather Events from the list of Event Streams.

Now you can edit the card to improve the presentation.

Click the Pencil icon on the card to edit the visualization.
On the Expression Builder tab, in the where field, select country ~ ***, Plot = over time using function = Average of temp by city.

You can now click Back to Dashboard to view your dashboard, and add more cards.

To learn more about the types of visualizations supported in Observe, see the Visualization Types Reference.

Adding Filtering Options to your Dashboard¶

There are two main ways to add filtering to your dashboard.

Dashboard Filtered Panel - Enables easy filtering of dashboard based on a selected dataset.
Parameter - A form field that allows filtering on charts and tables, or can filter on other parameters.

Adding a Parameter¶

A Dashboard Parameter lets you use common patterns like drop downs and text fields to filter data for more complex use cases. For instance if you want to filter a dashboard that uses many datasets and many panels (such as metrics, traces, and logs) by terms in a separate dataset (such as customer project names), you would use a Parameter to identify the customer project. Parameters support advanced features like mapping from names to IDs, multi-selection, All Values, and free form text entry.

To add a Parameter, edit the dashboard. Select Add to Dashboard, Parameters and Filters, and then Parameter. The following choices must be made:

Type - select from the following types of Parameters:
- Single-select dropdown. This parameter type allows the user to pick one item from a list. For instance, you might use User Names, and select Alice from a list of Alice, Bob, and Charlotte.
- Multi-select dropdown. This parameter type allows the user to pick multiple items from a list. For instance, you might use Project Names, and select Alpha and Delta from a list of Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta.
- Text Input. This parameter allows free-form entry of a text string.
- Number Input. This parameter allows free-form entry of a number.
- Resource Instance Menu. This parameter type allows the user to pick one resource from a resource dataset. All Parameter types need a user-facing Display Name (the name of the parameter in the dashboard) and an internal OPAL Token name (the variable used to test the parameter’s value in OPAL).

Single and Multi Select parameters can be populated in three ways: a Dataset, a Card from the dashboard, or a Custom list. This allows the user to select one or more parameters from a dynamic list to filter selected Cards in the dashboard. If the parameter is set to null or the “All Values” selection, no filtering is done in the selected Cards.

The Resource Instance parameter dropdown’s list of options can only be populated with the primary key of a resource dataset. For instance you might use Cluster Name, and populate the drop down with resources from your Kubernetes Clusters resource set. You may optionally allow a Null resource, which effectively means no filtering is done in the selected Cards.

After selecting a default value in the parameter builder, click Next to select dashboard cards that should be filtered by the parameter. On this screen you will map the parameter filter value to columns on the filtered cards. Your options will be limited by the data types involved. For instance a Number Input parameter can only be used to filter numeric columns, such as int64.

Click Apply to add the new Parameter to the Dashboard, then use your mouse to drag it to the correct section, position, and size. Click Save to test the parameter filtered dashboard.

Filtration Example¶

The Dashboard editor will make suggestions when you are configuring Filtered Datasets and Parameters. For example, we might make a new dashboard, add a card for Container Logs, add a card for Container Resources, and add a card for an unrelated dataset such as AWS ELB Active Connections metrics. When adding a Filtered Dataset to this dashboard, Kubernetes container relevant datasets are suggested as the best options to use.

Automatically Suggested Datasets for the Filtered Dataset Panel

After selecting a column and clicking Next, the selected column name is used to automatically suggest linkages in the relevant cards.

Automatically Suggested Card Linkages for the Filtered Dataset Panel

Note

The same suggestion capabilities are used for Dashboard Parameters.

Using Dashboards¶

To learn about presenting, sharing, and drilling down from dashboards, see Using Dashboards.

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Creating Dashboards¶

Dashboard Listing¶

Creating a New Dashboard¶

Using Weather Tutorial data¶

Adding Filtering Options to your Dashboard¶

Adding a Dashboard Filter Panel¶

Adding a Parameter¶

Filtration Example¶

Cross-Instance Sharing¶

Using Dashboards¶