Dashboard
Thomas Steele avatar
Written by Thomas Steele
Updated over a week ago

The Dashboard is the centerpiece of your Blue Matador account. It is where you will see a real-time view of the events in your system. The dashboard is meant to provide at-a-glance information on the health of your system and looks great on a TV in your office.

Active Events

The top-left of the Dashboard summarizes your currently active events and displays graphs for active events for the last 30 days. Events are categorized as Alerts, Warnings, or Anomalies, and each category of event has a section showing the number of currently active events and a line graph of 30 days.

The graphs consist of two areas. The y-axis corresponds to the number of events, and the x-axis corresponds to one day each of the past 30 days as well as the current day in UTC. The solid area indicates how many events were opened on each day, while the transparent area indicates the how many events were active on each day. The number of active events will always be greater than or equal to the number of opened events. Hovering over any part of the graphs will give you the exact date and counts for events on that day.

The number of opened events each day shows you the trend of new events occurring in your account. The number of active events shows you how well your team does at resolving opened events. If the active area is often larger than the opened area, then events are being left unresolved for days at a time.

Event Stream

The entire right half of the dashboard consists of the event stream. This is the real-time stream of events occurring across your entire Blue Matador account. Alerts, Warnings, and Anomalies will appear here in chronological order when they are opened, and will leave this area when they resolve. If the number of events is too great to display on your dashboard, it will automatically begin to scroll one event at a time. This behavior is automatically disabled if your cursor is in the event stream area.

Clicking on an event will take you to the Timeline at the point in time that event was created, with the event already selected.

If there are no currently active events, then a timer appears showing the time since the last Alert occurred.

Frequent/Infrequent Events

The bottom-left corner of the dashboard contains the Frequent Events and Infrequent Events tiles. These tiles rotate periodically so only one is visible at a time. If there is not enough data to display either frequent or infrequent events, it will not be displayed.

The frequent events are the 10 event types with the highest frequency over the last 30 days. In order to qualify as frequent, an event type must occur at least once. They are displayed with the number of occurrences. Frequent event types can indicate issues that happen repeatedly in your system. Clicking on one of the rows takes you to the Timeline filtered to that event type.

The infrequent events are the 10 event types with the lowest frequency that are not included in the frequent events. They are displayed with the time since the last occurrence. Infrequent events are a great way to find oddities in your system that would otherwise be lost in the noise of other event types. Clicking on one of the rows takes you to the Timeline filtered to that event type.

Projects

If you have set up projects, then a dropdown menu will be present in the header of the Dashboard where you can select a project to view. Selecting a project will filter all of the data on the dashboard to apply only to resources in that project. Selecting [all] means that all resources are included, regardless of project, and selecting [unassigned] only includes data from resources that do not match any project.

Dashboard User

A common use case for the Blue Matador Dashboard is to have it permanently displayed on a TV in your office. For this purpose, we have created a feature called the Dashboard User. This can be accessed from the header via Account > Dashboard User. By using the Dashboard User, you swap out your authentication credentials for credentials that are limited to read-only access to the Dashboard and no other parts of the app or API. These credentials last one year instead of the standard 7 days, so you do not have to log in frequently. Also, any user on your account can use this feature, so you do not have to create a special “dashboard-only” account for your TV.

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