What are Dashboards?

PerformanceGuard Dashboards allow users to continuously monitor key metrics by organizing and customizing the data and present in the way that is relevant to you. You can have multiple dashboards that serve different purposes and you can switch between them. All you need to know about dashboards:

Dashboard Basics

When dashboards are ready, use the menus at the top of each dashboard to control what the dashboard displays: Which Computers you want to view information about, which Time period you want the dashboard’s graphs and timelines to cover, etc.

Tip

In the Computers menu you can search for computers by computer name, but also by user name, location name, subnet name and agent group name.

The layout of each dashboard is determined by your PerformanceGuard administrator, and as a regular user you can’t change it. However, your administrator may occasionally give you freedom to change individual widgets, because the administrator can choose between these settings that determine what you can do with the content of each widget:

• Inherit: The typical setting. The widget uses the settings that you specify in the top of the dashboard. If all widgets on a dashboard use this setting, the entire dashboard will reflect the settings that you specify in the top of the dashboard.
• User may change: You can change some or all elements on the widget, independently of what you have specified in the top of the dashboard. When that’s the case, the widget has this icon that you can click to edit it:
• Fixed: You can’t change some or any elements on the widget, not even if you specify something else in the top of the dashboard. This setting is primarily relevant for widgets that contain reference information. It can explain why a widget may occasionally not respond to the settings you select in the top of the dashboard.

Important

Example: Your PerformanceGuard administrator can set up a widget with fixed content about how computers perform at your organization’s headquarters. This way, you’re always able to select a computer in the top of the dashboard, and compare the performance of that computer with overall performance at headquarters.

Dashboard Categories

To ease navigation, dashboards have been put into three categories:
My Dashboards shows the dashboards created by you. These can only be viewed by you unless you make it public  and then it will also be shown in Public Dashboards. Public dashboards can only be edited by the creator or an administrator.

Built In dashboards are placed in their own category and cannot be edited, only copied. Read more about the Built In Dashboards.

Create New Dashboard

Caution

You can only do this if you’re a PerformanceGuard administrator.

It you want to create your own dashboard, select DASHBOARDS and then click the plus button and add the widgets that you want.
Access the PerformanceGuard web interface from a computer when you create a new dashboard. Don’t use a mobile device, because you won’t be able to design the dashboard layout properly in mobile view.

Share a Dashboard

Dashboard sharing allows the operator to share a dashboard with others. Sharing is from the dashboard by selecting Share from the menu .

Important

Sharing is not possible: You may get the message “Sharing is not possible because SMTP is not set up”. You can set up SMTP by clicking the SET UP SMTP or contact administrator.

Important

National characters in domain names are not supported: National characters are not supported in a domain email e.g. “æ,ø,å”. If your domain email will contain national characters e.g. user@sørøver.dk, it will fail to validate the e-mail address and will not allow you to send an e-mail to the supplied address.
The dashboard sharing is always by Mail but with two different ways:

Share by mail as a Link or PDF

You can share dashboard by a mail via a Link or PDF.

As a Link by mail

The recipient will receive a mail with a link to the shared dashboard.

The user will be able to view the Dashboard in the time period that was selected by the sender. The time period will be either the currently selected or the default time period for the dashboard.

As a PDF by mail

This option allows you to mail a PDF version of your current dashboard in a printer friendly version using the currently selected time period.

Each widget on the dashboard will be presented on its own page in the PDF. Once received, you can distribute this PDF as desired.

Caution

Recipients The email address of the notification Recipient.
It is possible to share the dashboard with multiple users simultaneously.

Note (optional): It will be a part of your email message body.

**Share as:**You can share dashboard as a Link to PerformanceGuard or as a PDF.

Tip

You can only select Time period if you are sharing the dashboard as a Link.

Important

**Example:**Click thumbnail to view image in full size.

**Time Period:**The dashboard can be shared with the current and default dashboard settings.

Current Time Period shows the dashboard exactly as it looked at the time of sharing e.g. if you want to show something on your graph or share an issue then current time period is recommend to use. The user will be able to view the dashboard with the time period of sharing even though the mail is read after some hours or days.

Dashboard default shows the dashboard with the default time period e.g. when the user will open the link for the shared dashboard, they will get the default time period view.

Edit or Copy Existing Dashboard

Caution

You can only do this if you’re a PerformanceGuard administrator.

Select DASHBOARDS, click the menu next to the required dashboard, and then select Edit or Copy as required.

Access the PerformanceGuard web interface from a computer if you want to edit the dashboard layout. Don’t use a mobile device, because you won’t be able to design the dashboard layout properly in mobile view.

Multi-Editor Environments

If two PerformanceGuard administrators edit the same dashboard, PerformanceGuard will detect the potential conflict.

Important

Example: Karen and Thomas are PerformanceGuard administrators who want to improve the Computer Overview dashboard. At 10.05 Karen edits the dashboard and saves it. Meanwhile, Thomas has also been editing the dashboard, and at 10.06 he saves his changes. Now PerformanceGuard asks Thomas if he wants to 1) save his changes and overwrite the changes made by Karen, or 2) discard his changes and reload the dashboard with the changes made by Karen.

You can view the history of a dashboard, including who’s made changes: Click the menu on the dashboard itself, and then select History. From the dashboard history you can also restore an earlier revision of the dashboard if required.

Tip

If you restore a dashboard to revision 0, you return to the dashboard’s factory defaults.

If there’s a dashboard revision that’s newer than the one that you view, and you attempt to restore the new revision, PerformanceGuard will simply reload the new dashboard revision for you instead of restoring it. This helps keep the number of revisions down.

Caution

If you or your colleagues made changes to a dashboard in PerformanceGuard 7.0, only the latest change will have been kept (as revision 1). This is because the dashboard revisions feature wasn’t introduced until PerformanceGuard 7.1.

Auto Update Dashboards

Auto-update allows you to update the dashboard according to your own needs to get latest updates fast and quick. You can specify how and when you want to update the dashboard allowing you constant monitoring and administration.

This feature will keep refreshing your dashboard always with all the latest and most recent updates. You can quickly just refresh your dashboard by “Refresh now” as well as set time intervals which can be turned off when it is required.

Important

My auto update is not running frequently as it should be? If the user has the page currently running auto-update as a background tab in their browser, the browsers will down prioritize the page i.e. the auto-update will run less frequently than the user has set (until it becomes the active tab again).