Transcript
and in this video I'm going to show you how to create a custom dashboard in NCentral. NCentral comes with dashboards pre-configured for you out of the box, but often they just have generic settings in them. Custom dashboards allow you to really focus on checks that are important to you, and it's a really great way of having an at-a-glance view of what's going on within your customer's environment. A really great way of implementing custom dashboards is not to look for all devices that fall into a certain filter, but actually to create your own bespoke filter so you can hone us on monitoring statuses that are not in normal state. So before we create our own dashboard, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to create a filter that looks exactly for what we want to show on that dashboard as well. So on the left-hand navigation pane, we're going to come down to Configuration and Filters, and we're going to create a new filter. I'm going to look for servers that have certain monitoring items in a not normal state as such. Critical things like disk, maybe CPU and memory, but you can build this dashboard for whatever you want. I'm going to call my filter Server Issues, and I can put a description of what this does as well. So in order to build this filter, I'm going to use Advanced Mode, and I'm going to create a custom expression. Now I'm looking for A, which is going to be my Windows Server devices, and in brackets, B, R, C, R, D. So I can go ahead there, if I could spell correctly, go ahead and generate this filter for me. So A is going to be a device. We're going to say class, and we're going to say equals to, and we're going to choose Server Windows. And then B, C, and D is going to be the monitoring that I'm looking for. So I'm going to choose Monitoring. I'm going to choose End Central Service is in status. The service that I'm going to choose initially is disk, and I'm going to say is not equals to normal. So if it's in something other than normal state, I want to know about it, and I want that to appear on my dashboard. We're going to repeat the process for the other services that we want to work on as well. So we're going to choose Monitoring, Enable End Central Service in status. We're going to choose CPU this time around. And again, we're going to choose not equals to normal. And finally, we're going to choose the last service that we want for this purpose, and we're going to choose Monitoring, and again, Enable End Central Service in status, and we're going to choose Memory. So again, we'll choose not equals to normal. So I'm going to go ahead and I can preview this, and already I can see which devices are going to fall into this filter. So I can save this filter now, and I can use this filter on my dashboard. So dashboards really just comprise of a filter and then the monitoring checks that you want to show on that dashboard as well. So we're going to come up to our Manage Dashboards tab. We're going to click on Add to create a new dashboard in here. I'm going to call this Server Issues. I'm going to use my Server Issues filter that I've just created. So we're going to bring that across in here. And under Monitoring Options, I'm going to choose what I want to display on the dashboard. I'm going to choose Agent Status. I always include Agent Status on the dashboards because it's important. If the agent has failed, then that might be why the other monitoring services are in a failed state as well. I'm also going to include our Disk Service, our CPU Service, and our Monitoring Service to reflect what we're filtering on with a custom filter as well. So really, you could have this for anything. This could be physical hardware in your Dell or HP servers. This could be backup jobs that you want to monitor and find your failed backup jobs as well. So I've created my dashboard. I'm going to go ahead and click on Save. I now have my Server Issues dashboard available to me on my left-hand navigation pane. I can click on that and I can see all the servers that are in a failed or in a not normal state when it comes to disk, CPU or memory. So I can then go and troubleshoot these. And this is a great way of having, if you've critical data, a dashboard up in your office where it refreshes every 10, 20, 30 seconds, whatever it may be. And then it can show you live information. So as soon as a critical piece of information is detected, it can appear on this custom dashboard as well. So guys, that's how you create custom dashboards in Encentral. I hope you found this video useful and we'll see you on the next one. Thank you.
