To fill your dashboard with useful information, you need to add widgets. Widgets are the charts and graphs that make up a dashboard and are fed by dashboard data sources. A widget only has a single data source, but widgets on a single dashboard may be fed by different data sources.
This article presents general procedures and tips for working with widgets. More detailed information can be found in the articles that describe the individual widget types.
Adding a widget to a dashboard
- Go to the Dashboards area, then select the dashboard to which you want to add the widget.
- Select Add Widget. Choose the widget type from the list that appears on the left side, and then select the data source that you want to feed the new widget with.
- Enter the required information in order to configure the widget. Note that the form will be specific to the widget type you have selected. For more information, see the articles in the Available widgets section.
- Click the Add widget button to generate the widget on the dashboard. If there are any errors in the field values, a notification will appear on-screen.
Managing widgets
Once you have added a widget to your dashboard, you can access its configuration options by clicking the icon in the top right corner:
The options are as follows:
| Expand | Select this option to view the widget in full-screen mode. |
|---|---|
| Configuration | This opens the settings form so that you can modify the configuration of the widget. |
| Go to Query | Select this option to open the Data Search area displaying the query that is the data source of the widget. |
| Delete | Delete the widget from the dashboard. |
Tips
These tips are applicable to all widgets:
- The information about the data source used in each widget is displayed at the top of the configuration box. This information is very useful if you need to check the state of its associated aggregation task in the Administration → Data Management → Aggregation Tasks area.
- Setting the Actions field to All is recommended in most of the charts.
- Be careful with the name of the aggregated fields: it is not possible to change it, so it is important to think about it before doing the aggregation in the query.
- The parameter Time Range is used to establish the period of data available. The highest value to set is one year. Therefore, if the data source is configured to store one month of data, this will be the maximum period to select.
- The option Group by is available in some of the widgets, and is used to select the visual grouping. This option is related to the Time Range field. For instance, if the time range is low, it is possible to group even by minutes; however, if the time range is one month or one year, it is not possible to group by minutes, but only by days or hours.
Available widgets
This is the list of available widgets you can add to a dashboard: