When you log in to the ThousandEyes platform, the first view that you see is the Dashboards page, containing charts and easy-to-read graphs summarizing your data. It provides dynamic and real-time insights into your network and application performance. This chapter guides you through the intricacies of ThousandEyes dashboards, helping you to harness the full potential of this essential feature.
As you enter the Dashboards page, you are greeted with live status dashboards, offering a snapshot of a specific time period (by default, 24 hours). Additionally, you have the capability to schedule and share point-in-time snapshots of a dashboard. You can organize the information derived from tests and Internet Insights into highly customized layouts. These layouts can be presented numerically, in tables, or through intuitive graphs, allowing for a comprehensive understanding of your network and application health.
A noteworthy feature of the Dashboards page is that it automatically refreshes every 2 minutes, ensuring you are consistently updated with the latest data. This not only facilitates active monitoring but also prevents automatic logouts due to inactivity. This attribute makes the Dashboards page suitable for deployment in kiosks or operations center displays.
This chapter introduces the various components, customization options, and strategies for effective utilization of ThousandEyes dashboards.
Dashboard Basics
When you log in to the ThousandEyes UI the Dashboard menu is the first page you see. By default, the dashboard uses the test data that has already been created to populate its visualizations.
As an example, Figures 5-1 and 5-2 show the defaults where the test data is represented in a basic dashboard view; we will look at how to customize for more granular specifics.
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Figure 5.1 Dashboard Defaults
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Figure 5.2 Dashboard Defaults Continued
When the tests shown in Figure 5-1 trigger alerts, the details of the alerts are displayed in the Alert List widget shown in Figure 5-2, including the alert rule that triggered the alert and the alert type.
You can quickly customize your Dashboards page by adding one or more of the built-in dashboards that ThousandEyes provides. From the Dashboard drop-down list, choose ThousandEyes Built-in, as shown in Figure 5-3, to see other built-in dashboards that might fit your needs. Notice that the dashboard categorizes the tests, so creating structure early on will help users operationalize and locate metrics more easily.
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Figure 5.3 Dashboard Built-ins
As an example, Figure 5-4 shows the HTTP Server built-in dashboard. You can see a completely different experience versus the other default dashboard. The point of this is to show examples of what metrics can be displayed and how layouts can be presented.
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Figure 5.4 HTTP Server Built-in Dashboard
To help you maneuver around the dashboard, Figure 5-5 provides a quick reference for the various functions in the dashboard.
The Add Widget button and ellipsis menu shown in Figure 5-5 are the typical starting points, respectively, for adding widgets to a dashboard and creating a new dashboard, or editing or deleting an existing dashboard. These controls enable administrators to organize specific data and structure it according to a particular use case. For example, grouping Agent to Agent tests that connect to the data center enables administrators to swiftly identify issues and generate high-level reports.
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Figure 5.5 Dashboard Built-in Controls
Widgets
In the context of ThousandEyes dashboards, widgets are visual elements that represent specific types of data or metrics. Widgets can represent data from alerts, agents, and tests. They provide a dynamic and interactive way to present information relevant to your monitoring and testing needs. The following are some common types of widgets that you might encounter when expanding or customizing a dashboard:
Widget Type: Live Status
Agent Status: Offers a live look at the status of your Enterprise or Endpoint Agents to give you an idea of overall agent health.
Tests: A 12-hour, live display of a list of tests configured in your account group for a one-stop glance at high-level test health. Grayed-out rows show disabled tests.
Alert List: Provides a look at the alerts that were active during the configured time interval.
Widget Type: Breakdown
Stacked Bar: Provides horizontal histogram bars with multiple values, useful for composite metric data and for comparing values between multiple tests or on a per-country basis.
Grouped Bar: Represents multiple values as single bars in a group of bars, oriented either horizontally or vertically.
Pie: Similar to Stacked Bar chart widgets, representing data in a circular statistical graphic. It is used to illustrate numerical proportions, which makes it easier to understand the distribution of the selected metric.
Widget Type: Data Summary
Table: Allows a breakdown of numbers by rows and columns, listing by test, country, continent, or data source.
Multi-Metric Table: Can have columns with different metrics, displaying more varied information.
Number: Displays one or more cards, each showing a single scalar quantity or a number of alerts.
Color Grid: Displays an array of colored cards, where each card’s color depends on the configured color scale.
Widget Type: Time Series
Line: This widget displays data using a line plot, where time is represented on the horizontal axis and the selected metric or quantity is shown on the vertical axis. This type of visualization is particularly useful for observing trends and patterns over a specified time period.
Stacked Area: Line plots showing quantities over time, similar to stacked bar charts but representing values over time.
Box and Whiskers: Plots data values versus time on the horizontal axis, with the vertical axis displaying the median, minimum, and maximum data points per time value.
Widget Type: Maps
Map: Displays data on a world map based on the location of testing systems, with options to show data per country, continent, or per agent. This allows the user to quickly determine whether a specific region is experiencing issues.
These widgets offer a versatile set of tools to visualize and analyze data from different perspectives, catering to various monitoring needs. To access the widgets described in the previous list, from the dashboard, click Add Widget to see all the widgets (see Figure 5-6).
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Figure 5.6 Widgets
Adding widgets to a built-in dashboard is a common practice to tailor the display according to specific needs. The purpose of each widget is to provide a clear visualization of different data metrics. In the next section, we delve into the process of creating a new dashboard, offering you the flexibility to curate your own visualizations based on the available widgets.
Creating a New Dashboard
Creating a dashboard in ThousandEyes is as straightforward as adding a widget to a built-in dashboard. To effectively use dashboards, it’s essential to understand the different widget types and the data they display. This ensures that the relevant metrics are visualized in a way that best supports your monitoring needs.
From the dashboard, click the New button and choose Dashboard (see Figure 5-7) to create a new dashboard and add widgets to it.
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Figure 5.7 Create New Dashboard Menu Selection
In the Create New Dashboard dialog box that opens, shown in Figure 5-8, give the dashboard an intuitive name and choose which account group(s) will be able to view the dashboard. In the View Settings, you can check Set As Private if you don’t want anyone else to be able to view the dashboard, or you can check Set As My Default or Set As Default for Account Group if you want this dashboard to be displayed by default on your own Dashboards page or the account group’s Dashboards page, respectively. Click Create Dashboard to create the shell dashboard and return to the Dashboards page to configure it with widgets.
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Figure 5.8 Dashboard Creation
On the Dashboards page, locate your new dashboard and click its Add Widget button to open the Add a Widget panel (refer to Figure 5-6). Click a widget to open a separate panel in which to configure it. As an example, Figure 5-9 shows the panel that opens when adding the Color Grid widget (Data Summary type). When creating a new widget, all the options can seem overwhelming. Focus on how you want the data to look, and experiment with the various widgets to find what suits you (click Cancel instead of Save to return to the Add a Widget panel and choose a different widget to view).
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Figure 5.9 New Dashboard Widget
Step 1. Data Source: Select a data source from the Data Source drop-down menu. Most users may use the default option, Cloud & Enterprise Agents, but it’s crucial to consider other options, such as Internet Insights or Endpoint Agents.
Step 2. Category: Choose the category. Specify what aspect or metric you want to monitor from the selected data source. For example, if you have chosen Cloud & Enterprise Agents as your data source, you might select Web - HTTP Server as the category to display metrics related to HTTP server performance.
Step 3. Metric: Select the specific metric you want to monitor. You have several options to choose from, including Availability, DNS Time, or SSL Time. For the purposes of this example, let’s select Availability as the metric.
Step 4. Measure: After selecting the metric, you’ll need to determine how you want to measure it by choosing an option from the Measure drop-down list. The options include Median, Maximum, and Minimum.
Step 5. Cards: Select Tests from the Cards field drop-down menu. If you are using categories, use the Group Cards By field to organize them accordingly. This helps in sorting and grouping specific tests or agents. Although not covered in previous chapters, labeling enables users to group specific tests or agents together. For this example, choose All to include all relevant tests or agents.
Step 6. Set up filters: Scroll down to the Filter By section (this section is not shown in Figure 5-9) and select Tests to filter the data. If you have numerous agents worldwide running those tests and want to focus on specific agents, add additional filters to define your data more precisely.
Step 7. Save and view the data: Click Save to apply the data and the layout to your new widget. Figure 5-10 shows the example Color Grid widget. There are additional widgets you can include: Add Agent Status and Endpoint Agents represent Real-Time Agent Status and End User Experience status in the dashboard (see Figure 5-11).
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Figure 5.10 New Widget
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Figure 5.11 Agent Widget Example
Creating a dashboard allows your imagination to come alive and paint the picture of the network from many perspectives. Dashboards are fully customizable and can be created for a single use case if needed.
Another great feature of widgets is that you can duplicate a widget, change a metric or two (for example), and save the duplicate as a new widget. That way, you don’t have to go through the entire process of creating a new widget every time you need one.
The Embed Widget feature, shown in Figures 5-12 and 5-13, allows you to grab the data and use it as an iframe to insert in a web page, wiki page, or anything external that can use an iframe.
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Figure 5.12 Widget Features
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Figure 5.13 Iframe Widget
Returning to the dashboard widgets, if you encounter errors or issues, you can click on the widget to identify which test(s) are experiencing problems (see Figure 5-14). When you click on the widget, a window will appear to show all tests that are associated within that widget. In the next chapter, we explore how to monitor and troubleshoot network performance issues.
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Figure 5.14 Associated Test to Widget
Review Questions
Answer the following questions. Check your answers against those provided in Appendix A, “Answers to Review Questions.”
1. Can you create a widget that shows only alerts from Internet Insights?
2. Is there a way to extract the dashboard data to a web page?
3. When creating a widget, can you add more than one metric? If not, how can this be done?
4. What would be the best widget to use when looking at end users’ wireless signal strength?