We’re excited to announce the first version release of our new dashboard framework: Dashboard (New). Built on top of a scalable, flexible, and extensible charting system, the new dashboards provide customers with deep control over their visuals, enable metadata rich workflows, and create dashboards in a dashboard first GUI.
Why did we build a brand new dashboard framework?
We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from all of you about our existing dashboards. They’re great for showing key insights, and you use them as a critical part of your monitoring, troubleshooting, and security processes to keep reliable and secure systems. However, you’ve told us time and again that you want more control, more visualizations, better real-time support, export capabilities, and a huge list of critical dashboarding features. We took a hard look at your requests and our vision for where we wanted to get with dashboards and realized that we had to re-invest from the ground up in creating a more flexible, powerful, and performant dashboarding system.
Our Philosophy with Dashboard (New)
For too long, we’ve taken a prescriptive stance about our dashboarding capabilities. From font sizes to color choices, our customers have felt the pain of restrictive settings. With Dashboard (New), we’re taking a reformed stance. We want to put the control back in the users hands and be far more transparent about the way panels are created, styled, and backed via queries. We want to continuously improve the types of visual stories that our customers are able to tell with our dashboarding framework. This meant that we explicitly made it a point to make sure that all data streams were supported as equally as possible in the new dashboards. In the 1.0 release, you’ll see that we’ve enabled a bunch of visualizations across logs and metrics that you can create with either data-stream or even both data-streams.
Furthermore, we recognize that dashboards are critical to the way our customers process information, so in addition to improved visual control, we want to make sure that our dashboards are workflowable, and carry the context through each hop. This v1.0 release is just the beginning of our journey towards a truly extendable, controllable, and workflowable dashboard system. With every release that follows, we hope to continue to increase your workflow and visual control capabilities on dashboards.
Highlights
In this v1.0 release of dashboards, we’ve primarily focused on enabling interactive dashboard use-cases, so unfortunately, you won’t be able to flip these dashboards into live-mode just yet. However, as we’ve gone through and implemented interactive charts, we’ve improved the capabilities in a few ways.
New Chart Types
In Dashboard (New), you’ll have access to a host of new chart types across both logs and metrics data-streams. Some specific callouts include honeycomb, scatter, and bubble charts.
Display Overrides
Tired of the days of not being able to set your Error bar to red? We are too! In the new dashboard framework, we’ve introduced a feature called Display Overrides that enables you to override the styles of a specific series, or query. And if display overrides can’t serve your customization needs, we expose the guts of the panel through a JSON tab where you can go in and add in customizations that may not be available in the UI just yet.
Template Variables
Dashboard filters were a great way to segment the data on your dashboards, but sometimes you needed more fine grained control over how exactly that data was filtered out. With template variables, you have the replace text syntax from search parameters available as a dashboard filtering mechanism, so that if you want to dynamically choose aggregation types, timeslices values, or just simply select a data-stream you now can.
Logs and Metrics Queries
Not only do you have more visualizations for metrics and logs, you can actually graph them together on the same panel in the new dashboard framework. Whether you want to graph across multiple logs queries, logs and metrics queries, or multiple metrics queries, you can create panels across up to 6 logs and 6 metrics queries to create the ultimate compact panel visualization.
So how do I get started?
To start using the new dashboards, click on the +new button in the top right corner, and select Dashboard (New)! You’ll be launched in our new dashboard GUI, where you can add a panel inline. Of course, you can always add a panel through the search or metrics interfaces as well. Just remember to toggle on the Dashboard (New) button if creating a new dashboard.
For more information and detailed docs about Dashboard (New), visit our docs center here: https://help.sumologic.com/Beta/Dashboard_(New)
Where are we going?
As I was saying, this is just the beginning. We are going to be continuously investing in improving our dashboarding capabilities to make them even more effective at creating your perfect visual stories. Some of the items on the docket include:
- Export via PDF/PNG, and scheduled exports
- Repeating panels, so you can support your dynamic per entity use-cases.
- Brand new visual themes and dark theme support, so that the data looks amazing on every monitor.
- Easy in-product migration mechanisms, so you can start leveraging new dashboards as quickly as possible.
We are super excited to see more of our customers give these new dashboards a try, and leverage a bunch of the new capabilities we’ve baked into it. As we continue to grow these dashboards, we want to continue to hear your feedback and your issues. Feel free to reach out to the dashboarding team via the Sumo Dojo, support, or your account team!
