Dashboards UIv4 is available starting August 23!
We're thrilled to announce an update to enhance your dashboard user experience. With this UIv4 update, we’re introducing an intuitive new design that aligns with the new LM experience, making your dashboard navigation more seamless with other areas of the product. Update the toggle on the top navigation to ‘New UI Preview’ to see the following changes.
What's New:
🎨 Revamped User Experience: Our team has been hard at work reimagining the dashboard's visual appeal. With a new skin, your dashboards are now in line with the rest of the UIv4 changes that you’ve become accustomed to. While the core functionality remains intact, new aesthetics that consistency across the platform improve the quality of our LM experience.
🛠️ Enhanced Widget Editing: We've heard your feedback, and we're excited to introduce a new capability to the dashboard widget editing process. Say goodbye to the hassle of publishing a widget to witness changes – you can now preview your modifications in real-time before hitting that publish button. This means you have the power to experiment, tweak, and fine-tune your creations with the confidence of knowing exactly how they'll appear to your dashboard consumers.
Thank you for being a part of our beta community. Your insights and feedback have been invaluable in shaping these new changes. We take pride in helping guide our analytics journey and want to get you to your destination in style.
As always, your feedback is essential to us, so please don't hesitate to share your thoughts and experiences as you dive into these exciting new features.
Stay tuned for more updates, and happy dashboarding!
Best regards,
Faran - Senior Product Manager for Dashboards and Reporting
Cole McDonald
·2 years agoValues no longer show in mouseover in graph widgets:
LM User
·2 years agoDoes anyone know if there’s a way to force fullscreen either for a dashboard or a specific widget on load?
You know what? If the widgets on the resource tabs were made into actual widgets and we had the ability to tell them to load full width, the resources and dashboards pages could be consolidated into a single UI.
LM User
·2 years agoYou can move the widget editor to the right side, the bottom, or pop it out into a modal. This is similar to how dev tools works in chromium based browsers. I do wish some icons could be used though:
Agree that most UI developers think about either tall mobile devices or wide screens. CSS was built years ago to account for this, automatically adjusting to entirely different layout options given the width of the screen. Unfortunately, I don’t think LM CSS’d the UI, it probably came from a framework that they still don’t have much control over.
I never noticed that it doesn’t signify which widget is being edited. That’s a big problem. The only indicator is the title in the editor. Even making changes and hitting preview doesn’t actually re-scroll to show the modified widget. If I start editing a widget, scroll down on the dashboard, then hit preview, I still don’t see any of my changes because I’d have to scroll back up. I like the idea of highlighting it on the page somehow. Like marching ants or something (is that too 90’s? New UIs don’t have to look new).
Joe Williams
·2 years agoAs others have said, white space usage is insane. Filter should either be a turn off/on per dashboard or moved into one of the top bars. Either where the time selector is or the Favorite/Play/Fullscreen bar.
Widgets load much slower. And while these slow loading widgets load, its just a blank box with a spinner. We should at least get the title/header so we can think whether we care if this one loads or not.
Editing a widget, uses vertical space, but not all of it. In this day and age, monitors are wider, not taller. I would rather have the screen split vertically instead of horizontally. Also there is no way to know which widget I am editing. I would prefer either the current widget somehow has a backlight on it or the editing box doesn’t show the dashboard and instead shows a single copy of the widget we are editing.
TechCARE_NOC
·2 years agoFirst impressions: So much whitespace!!!
Secondly: I have a widget that spans the whole screen, and now, the 4 sensors are bunched in the top left corner, and I can’t resize the widget to match the space the sensors take up…
Currently this is not an improvement to UIv3
Cole McDonald
·2 years agoSome (not all) clicks on items in a NOC widget open 2 new tabs with the item’s group/resource. Others open 1 as expected. I can’t figure out what differentiates the behavior.
LM User
·2 years agoDoes anyone know if there’s a way to force fullscreen either for a dashboard or a specific widget on load?
Exactly my question here. Once you can put logs on dashboards, you’d have the power to almost completely customize the experience by giving people certain dashboards with certain capabilities. A dashboard with one widget on it should default to full size of the dashboard (no double scroll bars).
Cole McDonald
·2 years agoDoes anyone know if there’s a way to force fullscreen either for a dashboard or a specific widget on load?
Cole McDonald
·2 years agoNew NOC widget fits far more inside the widget than the old UI version when there’s a higher quantity of items. Scrolling up/down feels better than the side to side of the old one. Have to expand the widget to make it take up the white space above it to make it that single interface for this information. With the new UI, I can get it to display just over 100 buttons comfortably on my laptop screen, old UI actually reduces the # on the screen.
Old status background coloring was more clear visually than the newer pastel palette:
Cole McDonald
·2 years agoJSON has been built using manual PS runs to build out the data for the widget… now to patch it back and see how it looks… still a bit clunky a process, but a workaround that I will post my code for so the dev team can see what I want as a result and make this process easier somehow.
Cole McDonald
·2 years agoUltimately, I’d love for this Pure NOC dashboard to be able to link the NOC Item buttons to another Dashboard we’ve defined and feed it tokens to have it display content based on the client folder tokens we have set up for it using the group and resource selector posted a while back.
Cole McDonald
·2 years agook… I can add each client as its own NOC Item manually in the NOC widget… and * for every other field seems to get me what I want for the severity coloring. I may have to script something from the API to make it more scalable. It’ll still not be dynamic if we on-board/off-board clients…
If I make a propertySource that runs against a single collector, I can have that grab data from the API to get the subgroups, then build the new JSON for the widget and inject it. It’d only be daily, but that’s liveable.
Cole McDonald
·2 years agoIt seems as if the individual items in the NOC widget are evaluated down to the instance, then walked backwards through the manually applied groups associated with the parent device and that is used rather than anything defined in the group selection… I only want subgroups of group # 43 displayed in that widget… and the combined datapoint alert criticalities rather than all of the individual resources. I can get it to display the “Clients” group (#43)… or the endpoint subgroup… but not any of the interceding groups… i.e.:
/Clients/<Client Name>/DataCenter/Servers/RDS
...will show me either Clients… or RDS… but not <Client Name> no matter how I seem to structure the group glob expression. It also only allows me to select a single datapoint to evaluate rather than the whole of the subset of potential resource datapoints that could be alerting under that group.
Rather than 150 buttons, I end up with 1500 of them with no reference to the client environment they are from:
I’d like it to be more reflective of this set of data:
Cole McDonald
·2 years agoI’ve started experimenting with building from scratch using the new UI. First Widget I always use is a NOC widget on every single dashboard I make. UIv4 doesn’t respect the status filters in the NOC widget config. Showing SDT’d items even though I’ve asked it not to do so.
Still no way to use an arbitrary group level as the Groups displayed on the buttons. Specifics: We’re an MSP and have a “Clients” group with subgroups for each of our client environments. I don’t have a way to use that layer of groups explicitly. This prevents me from producing a NOC dashboard for our NOC staff to look at to define client status as it is still making an item per instance even when I select anything other than instance to display.
To make the dashboard I need, I’ll need to manually create 150 NOC widgets (one for each client). Unfortunately, it still won’t allow me to use that client group as the element in the widget, it requires instances as the end target.
This doesn't scale the way I need it to and doesn’t allow me to display the data I need it to. In the Resources view, focusing on the client’s subgroup shows all of the alerts under the alert tab sorted by criticality. I would expect that behavior from the buttons in the NOC widget when I’m targeting a specific group level. A NOC button for each client subgroup with the highest level alert criticality as effected by the filtering in the widget definition.
Joe Williams
·2 years agoThe community is 100% disconnected from the product.
But you should see the toggle, reach out to your CSM.
It also depends on your portal. We have 4 production portals and 1 sandbox. Only the sandbox had it by default.
LM User
·2 years agoThe community is 100% disconnected from the product.
But you should see the toggle, reach out to your CSM.
Jared Meidal
·2 years agoI am still not seeing a toggle for UIv4 in Dashboards, are there additional groups I need to join for this?
LM User
·2 years agoFullscreen widgets works so much better than they did in UIv3. I have several dashboards with only one widget and sizing has always been a problem. With how fullscreen widgets work now, would it be possible to specify a widget that automatically opens in full screen by default?
It would help me in this case, but it would also make possible a different troubleshooting workflow:
What if you could go to a dashboard and a single widget gives you a really good idea of whether or not something is wrong. If nothing is wrong, you move on. If something is wrong, you “un-fullscreen” it and there are a ton more widgets that help you walk down the troubleshooting path. Sort of like top level dashboard and drill in dashboard.
LM User
·2 years agoHas anyone noticed the huge waste of space taken up by the “add widget” plus sign now? It crosses the entire window from left to right, but only has that one thing in it. Why wouldn’t that have just been added to the bar right above it?
LM User
·2 years agoAh, the widget preview is new capability only when adding the widget for the first time. Previewing the widget when editing an existing widget has always been available in UIv3, though now you get to preview it on the page instead of in the modal. The ability to dock right is nice, I’m one of the ultra-wide monitor users.
LM User
·2 years agoJust warning you, that book will open your eyes to how badly most software is designed simply by ignorance.
Cole McDonald
·2 years ago@Stuart Weenig I’ll probably be buying that book now… I also reference the Apple Human Interface Guidelines from the 90s frequently. So much hands on research in there specifically relating to how people interact with technology.
LM User
·2 years agoOh, and the “more options” menu is actually called “overflow”. I know overflow is the technical term for that kind of thing, but it’s not what people think of and it’s not what it used to be called. Signifiers and mappings people (Chapter 2 last two pages).
Also, have you noticed how much wasted space there is at the top and bottom of widgets with pagination? I know it’s shown at the bottom everywhere else, but 90% of the top of the widget is white space, and 80% of the bottom widget is gray space. Combine the two and leave more space to show data.
I mean, just compare the data density. This is the same widget on the same dashboard. Only difference is UIv4 (top) and UIv3 (bottom). Previously, I could display 6 alerts in that widget. Now it shows 2. Losing 2/3 of the data I had at my fingertips is a bad move. UIv3 even had room to display the entire text of the notes field, while UIv4 cut off that and the Alert Rule column values.
Cole McDonald
·2 years agoI run in MS Edge (Chromium)… and haven’t used the fullscreen much as I do a lot of “drive-by” interactions with dashboards, quick load from favorites or search and then filter to info needed to troubleshoot.
The target screensize for us is the default laptop screen that we issue our employees. It’s the smallest non-handheld screen-size that will view the content.
The design philosophy is from working at a newspaper and how the front page is laid out to encourage people to buy the paper as a one off from either a newspaper stand or from the front of a business/grocery store. The goal is instant engagement with minimal effort investment from the consumer.
LM User
·2 years agoThat’s my primary complaint right now. What i used to be able to tell at a glance now requires interaction.
I like that philosophy. Lines up pretty well with what i’ve been gearing towards subconsciously.
Agreed on the size. 1920x1080 also lets it fit on cheap TVs that are often used as NOC wall mounted monitors. Having to scroll on a wall board is detrimental.
Also, I’ve got horizontal scroll bars on table widgets where both columns clearly fit within the width of the widget.
Have you noticed that the “fullscreen” option doesn’t actually remove all the chrome anymore? The full screen is more like 94% screen.
Cole McDonald
·2 years agoMinimum widget size is great increased in v4 reducing data density. My at-a-glance dashboards now require scrolling. Horizontally, it’s slightly increased, Vertically, I’ve lost an entire row of widgets.
Big number padding also reduces the visibility of the Big Number in the overall view, I definitely agree with Stuart here.
Criticality is present in an alerts widget in v3, missing in v4.
NOC widget vertical justification is a bit weird. I have a series of them across the top of a dash or different devices types, and some have 1, 2, or 3 devices in them… they spread vertically rather than stacking from the top down directly. It’s visually very odd. I’d post screenshots, but they contain client info that I can’t share publicly (dashboard 2366).
Loadtimes and scrolling is slow as with the rest of v4, I assume that will be worked out before release.
I have to play with custom builds within the widgets yet, this was all based on the primary dashboard we use to view client environments at a glance for faster general troubleshooting (Specific Purpose: Support MTTR reduction).
I’m excited to see this progress. In terms of layout that I’m using to evaluate the changes, this is our design guide - some of the changes make the Initial Broad/Visual pieces disappear into the rest of the dashboard (Widget Space larger, inner elements smaller):
LM User
·2 years agoThe new pagination options do fix a pain i had previously: if the widget was configured for top-5 displayed, or 5 per page, expanding the widget would still only give me top-5 or 5 per page; expanding the widget was useless. At least now expanding it gives me more than what i was seeing before. But the pagination when not expanded is so busted that it’s not worth the tradeoff.
LM User
·2 years agoEditing the alert list widget to add the severity column broke the widget config in UIv3. Going back to UIv3, all i get are spinning dots.
Editing in UIv3 and resaving seems to have fixed it, but i lost all my column widths when i do that.
LM User
·2 years agoThe big number widgets have some wicked large padding on the inside, making the numbers not very big at all.
Clicking on the alert in the alert widget no longer brings up the dialog box that provided a handy quick way of acking, adding SDT, escalating, and/or adding a note. Bring that back. Having to open it in a new tab with UIv4’s lagginess is just not workable.
LM User
·2 years agoNope, not gonna use this any time soon. All my widgets lost their pagination settings so i’ve got hundreds of scroll bars within scroll bars.
Pagination in dashboard widgets should either honor the settings in the widget or should automatically paginate with page size equal to the number of rows that fit in the widget.
Also, in the alert list widget, the severity coloring is gone unless i specifically add the severity column, which i cannot resize even though it’s taking up way more space than is needed.
David Bond
·2 years agoIn version 191, existing dashboards that work in UIv3 are broken. See https://panoramicdata.logicmonitor.com/santaba/uiv4/dashboards/dashboardGroups-12,dashboards-314 as an example.
LM User
·2 years agoHow is this different from the current widget preview option?