Forum Discussion

Cole_McDonald's avatar
Cole_McDonald
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6 years ago

Dashboard Templates

I'm currently working on building out  common dashboards for a large number of subgroups of server resources in our environment (we're a multi-tenant managed hosting company - so one for each of our customer's environments).  it's a simple dashboard with 5 widgets.  I have each of them driving device selection through a token with our internal unique customer id number.  The problem will come if I ever need to change anything in the dashboard... while I built a single dashboard initially, then cloned it 50 times... making any incremental change 50 times sounds like I'm guaranteed a day of annoyance in the future.

I'd like to see a way to make a template dashboard that can be linked to so you can change a single master dash and have an entire set of child dashboards change.  In our example, the server status dashboards for each of our clients.

  • mnagel's avatar
    mnagel
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    6 years ago

    This same problem exists in much of LM -- encouraging cloning with lack of an inheritance feature is the root cause.  I agree this is needed as it is needed for LogicModules and pretty much anything in the system.

  • Cole_McDonald's avatar
    Cole_McDonald
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    6 years ago

    A slicer widget would be awesome as well... I'm going to see if I can build one somehow using some categories and dynamic groups with some scripted HTML or something.

  • jasbro's avatar
    jasbro
    6 years ago

    @Cole McDonald I use dashboard groups.  Put your tokens on the group instead of on the dashboard.  Then you can edit your "template" dashboard and clone it to each of the groups.  Here are some draw-backs of this approach.  1. Each dashboard has the same name (I like to have the client name and client environment in each, so I still have to edit each one for that).  2. If you have a graph of response times for a website, there is no way to use tokens for that, you have to go to the website graphs and "Add to dashboard"  3.  Every time you edit the template, you have to clone it X number of times, but at least you don't have to edit each one to specify the token values.

  • Cole_McDonald's avatar
    Cole_McDonald
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    6 years ago

    That's what I've been doing currently.  Any change to it though means you have to change, then distribute that change manually still.  So it's pretty much set in stone once you've produced it at scale.  The templating would be a way to make changes without having to take this process to that extreme.