Device / Instance Count in Widget

We receive requests from customers every now and then asking whether we could display the number of devices/instances dynamically on a widget, either through a Big Number Widget or Custom Graph Widget.

An ancestral practice involves creating a complex datapoint with a value of 1, and then aggregate the sum of this datapoint on the widget to retrieve the total number of devices/instances. This could be tedious as it involves changes made on the DataSource level.

There’s good news, though - We have modernized and simplified this method after making a breakthrough on a recent ticket utilizing the following neat and simple method, and we’d like to share this idea with our users:

On a high-level, the quintessence of this stratagem is as follows:

1) Identify a non-zero datapoint where you'd like to see it's devices/instance count
2) Configure an Aggregate SUM of this datapoint e.g. AggregateSUM
3) Configure an Aggregate AVERAGE of this datapoint e.g. AggregateAVG
4) Create a Virtual Datapoint with the following expression: AggregateSUM/AggregateAVG

Note: Datapoint with NaN will not be counted as a device or instance in the process of aggregation.

Example of device count configuration:-