Best Practices for Creating UIM Custom Dashboards

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

When creating custom dashboards there are a number of considerations to keep in mind. This Article provides a list of tips, techniques and best practices for creating Custom Dashboards.

Environment

• Component: Operator Console, dashboard designer webapp

Resolution

Custom Dashboard Best Practices

Set your canvas properties accordingly:

• Develop your dashboards keeping in consideration whatever resolution is appropriate for whatever resolution/size screen you need to view it on in the NOC/SOC/desktop/laptop and adjust the number of widgets/objects and most importantly your layout accordingly.

  Tip: If you create a background image of the desired size you can use it as a guide for your Dashboard layout. Make sure that the background image is high quality and/or a vector image and not taking up a lot of space due to its resolution.

• Rely on a graphics designer or learn to use Adobe Photoshop or a free tool like GIMP to create images with transparent sections.

• Use the out of the box widgets but also maintain a high-quality (vector images if possible), image library in a desktop folder and import one or more images from there if and when needed.

• Limit your Dashboard images to less than a total of 5 MB/200 images if possible.

• Please keep in mind that if you use too many images / nest too many urls/dashboards, overall dashboard performance can be adversely affected.

• The size of the data returned for a dashboard should not exceed ~5 MB. If it does, you may observe slow response. In order to estimate the data sent for a panel you can use the following guidelines:

Gauge, meter, slider: on average 50 bytes
Chart: on average 50 bytes for each sample
Table: size of data returned from query + overhead for each cell equal to (the length of the column name times 2) + 5 bytes.

• Try also to keep your Dashboard levels/links to a total of 3 LEVELS deep.

• Dashboard size/scope: create dashboards with future needs in mind so you plan for enough space to add more objects/images if needed, e.g., more servers, more images, more customers, devices, etc. Keep the dashboard flexible/adaptable.