A dashboard is a set of cards showing your project's data, sharing one time range. Creating one takes a moment; deciding what it is for is the part that determines whether anyone uses it.
Decide what the dashboard answers
The most common mistake is building one dashboard that shows everything. It becomes long, slow to read, and nobody can tell at a glance whether anything is wrong.
A dashboard works best when it answers a single question for a single audience. Useful shapes include the daily check on one structure, one instrument group such as the piezometers or the crackmeters, environmental conditions for a site, or the view you show a client.
If you find yourself scrolling to compare two cards, they probably belong on separate dashboards — or next to each other on this one.
Create it
- Open Dashboards for the project and create a new dashboard.
- Give it a name that says what it shows and who it is for. "North Abutment — daily check" ages better than "Dashboard 2".
- Save, then add cards.
New dashboards open with a time range of the past 24 hours. You can change that at any time and the choice is saved with the dashboard.
Creating and editing dashboards requires editor access at the dashboard level. Editor access on the project does not carry down into dashboards — see Roles and permissions.
Add your first cards
Cards are added from the action bar. Each card type is documented under Dashboard Card Types, but as a starting point:
| To show | Use |
|---|---|
| A measurement over time | Graph |
| The current state of a set of devices | Device health |
| The shape of a linear sensor array | Profile plot |
| Wind direction and speed together | Wind rose |
| How often readings fall into each range | Histogram |
| A site camera image | Camera |
| Context, notes, or a site drawing | Text or Image |
For a dashboard people will actually check daily, a Device health card near the top is worth the space. Without it, a chart that stopped updating three days ago looks much like a chart of a stable site.
Confirm it reads correctly
Before sharing, set the time range to a period you already understand and check that each card shows what you expect, in the units you expect.
Pay particular attention to units and to which device and metric each card is pointed at. Two similarly named metrics on the same device are easy to mix up, and a card built on the wrong one looks entirely plausible.
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