Summary:

Dan Baxter, Senior Sales Engineer, guides users around the Opengear Dashboard and specifies on how customizable and easy to use the interface is.

Transcript:

Hello, Dan Baxter, Senior Sales  Engineer with Opengear. Today, I’dl like to talk to you today about dashboards. Dashboards provide important summary information about your Out-Of-Band connections, IP interfaces, environmental status, and power status. When you first log into the graphical interface of our console servers, you can have them configured to display a dashboard, or you can click on the dashboard icon up at the top and get the dashboard. Each pane within the dashboard is called a widget.

Mine is currently set up with “Managed Devices” so I can look in it to see all the managed devices. Click on a managed device link here and edit the managed devices if I needed to.

I can also see the “Connection Manager”. This is really helpful because I can now see that I’ve got the main network connection and a failover connection. I can see that it is currently using the main connection versus the cell modem. You can also see the IP addresses as well as the fact that the internal cell modem IP address is not available because the modem is in failover mode. I can also go into “Port Activity” and see who’s logged in and who’s active, click on active users and disconnect them if I needed to.

If I have an “Environmental Status” or a “Temperature and Humidity” or a “UPS” or a managed powerstrip, and I’m logging that information, I can see that log of that information overtime.

Up in “Cell Statistics” I get a lot of great information. I can see the RSSI signal here. That’s a signal strength indicator so it’s a real good health indication for the cell modem. I can also see that it is initialized. I can see the carrier and I can see other important information such as the IMEI number of the device. This is all great summary information to have just to make sure that the cell modem is working fine and if you needed any troubleshooting, this would be a great place to start.

I can also look at the “Auto-Responses”. These are types of conditions that we’re watching for and alerting on and if I first logged into the device, I can see if any of that had happened since I’ve last been connected.

Now let’s take a look on how I might customize the widgets within the dashboard. Widgets can be configured under “System” — “Configured Dashboard”. And you can see that I can actually set up different dashboards for different groups. I can have a dashboard for admins, and dashboards can be created for individual groups. Let’s go ahead and just delete that dashboard. That will set the dashboard and its widgets back to the default setting. Now if I logged into the device and I looked at the dashboard you will see the nine widgets that make up the default dashboard.

One of the nice features of the dashboards is the ability to customize the view to adapt to your particular requirements. You can configure the dashboard layout, specifying the number of slots or widget panes that are displayed. You can also configure the order that those widgets that are displayed and then you can configure individual settings for each widget.

In slot one I like to have the “Managed Devices.” The second slot I like to have “Connection Manager”, and then in slot three I like to have cellular statistics. I also like to have “Environmental Monitoring” in that second slot on the left. And then in this slot, I like to have “Port Activity, Port Users” and in the final sixth slot I like to have “Auto-Response.” The number of widgets displayed within the dashboard can be customized under the widgets slot collection pull down. The default is nine, but in my example I’m going to change it to six. The other thing that is nice to know you can set up the refresh, and this is important because this dashboard is a great viewpoint you can put up in a knock or on a monitor just kind of as a health check for that site and you can it refresh every five minutes. That way, for instance, if there is an auto-response or change in the statistics on the failover or the cellular, you’ll see that. So I can go ahead and save that dashboard.

I can also go in and configure the widgets. So you can see if there is something that can be configured for the widget, you’ll see that in there. So I can actually see the number of the devices that are going to be listed. I can go into the lab temperature and humidity, and I can say that’s what I want to show. Finally in widget slot six, II can configure Auto-Response and I can display just the auto-responses that are most important to me or individual auto response that I’ve created. So let’s go ahead and save this dashboard, and now I can see that customized dashboard and the widgets. Well thank you very much; I hope you find this valuable and you’re able to leverage the dashboard. It’s a great feature. Thanks a lot!