Forum Discussion

mnagel's avatar
mnagel
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4 years ago

please make dashboards fully support tokens

Here are at least two items that need to be added to make the dashboard token feature more useful:

  • adjust widgets that cannot use tokens so they can (e.g., Alerts, Netflow, etc.)
  • allow arbitrary tokens to be inserted as needed within widget fields (e.g., device patterns, instance patterns, etc.)

A concrete example of the latter came upon me this morning.  We have multiple locations with similar equipment for which we want to display Internet usage details, one set per dashboard (cgraph and netflow widgets).  The edge device names vary as do the uplink ports to the ISPs in each location.  Cloning this dashboard solves virtually nothing as every single widget still requires editing.  If the tokens could be used, these dashboards could be cloned without the manual editing other than filling in the necessary tokens.  In some cases the tokens are insertable, but most fields do not allow them.  In this case, I defined various tokens like isp_1_name, isp_1_edge_device, isp_1_edge_port, etc. but could use them in very limited ways ultimately making the exercise pointless.

As with many things, we can at least workaround this with the API (at least I believe I could with some effort), but it would be much more accessible to folks if handled within the UI.