Monitor Applications with the IoT Dashboards

IoT Monitoring provides you with three dashboards to view and analyze the performance and usage of your application. Each dashboard provides you with a different aspect of your application's performance. Within each dashboard, you can view data visualized as widgets or detailed records or create custom widgets based on your chosen parameters.

The page introduces the features, functionality, and goal of each of these dashboards:

Device
Network Request
Error

Device Dashboard

The Device Dashboard enables you to monitor your device status, custom information, and custom device application information. You can view summary activity or use filters to drill down to view metrics for a specific device.

Using the Device Dashboard, DevOps can ensure that devices are up and running, product managers and business stakeholders can examine device activity and trends, and developers can drill down into results to identify issues affecting single or multiple devices.

Device Dashboard

Network Request Dashboard

The Network Request Dashboard enables you to view outgoing network requests, network request details, and analyze network requests.

Network Request Dashboard

With the Network Requests Dashboard, you can:

Check the availability of a device or service
Discover slow network requests
View failed network requests
Analyze and sort network requests by criteria such as status code, app version, and so on
Monitor network traffic over time

Error Dashboard

The Error Dashboard enables you to view crashes, exceptions, and custom errors, both fatal and non-fatal. DevOps can monitor activity list and notify developers of error events. The developers can select the error event to view details and download the stack trace for debugging.

Error Dashboard

The stack trace will only be available if it is reported with the IoT SDKs or through the IoT REST API.

With the Error Dashboard, you can:

Discover new errors
Assess the scope and impact of errors, such as how many devices are affected, what type of devices are affected, and how seriously affected are the devices.
Monitor error patterns
Download stack traces of errors to debug code
Discover broken devices (failed hardware)

How to Use IoT Dashboards

Although each dashboard presents different information, they all have the same UI functionality and features. This page provides an overview of the dashboard functionality to help you get started monitoring your devices.

Access the IoT Dashboards

Open the application you want.
Select one of the dashboards to view:
- Devices
- Network Requests
- Errors

View Dashboard Summaries

From each dashboard, you can view aggregated data in predefined and custom widgets. Each dashboard is in view mode by default, so data is read-only, although you can set filters, view details, and resize widgets.

Device Dashboard

View Details

To view details, you select a row in one of the tables and click the Details icon. The Device Details dialog displays. You can view when the three types of events (Custom Event, Network Request, and Error) occurred on the timeline, or by duration. You can also click on the event bar in the waterfall for more details.

Device Details

Filter Results

You can filter results by adding criteria. This enables you to focus on factors affecting availability, usage, and performance.

In this screenshot, the criteria softwareversion and Country are added, which could potentially home in on performance issues caused by a particular software version in a particular country.

Device Dashboard

Modify Content and Presentation

To modify the dashboard, you need to be in Edit mode. You simply change the toggle to Edit, and then you'll be able to add, move, resize, remove, and even create widgets.

Edit Dashboard Mode

Build Custom Dashboard Widgets

Each dashboard has predefined widgets for basic monitoring, but because there are so many different devices and platforms, you will need to create custom widgets with the Widget Builder, which guides you through the creation of a widget. This page provides guidance for selecting graph types and using filters when you create widgets.

How to Access the Widget Builder

Select a dashboard.
Change to Edit mode.
From the toolbar, click Add Widget.
From the dropdown, click Create a Widget.

Choose the Best Graph Type

The Widget Builder allows you to choose from one of six types of graphs, you should try to use the best graph for your data set. The following is a guideline for choosing the graph type:

Graph Type	Graph Properties	Use Case(s)
Pie Chart	Field Subfield Filters Name	Use pie charts to compare parts of a whole. Examples: For a retail device, the percentage of sales for each store. For a fitness device, the percentage of different types of activities such as running, bicycling, walking.
Bar Chart	Field Subfield Filters Name	Use bar charts to compare different items within the same category. Examples: For an inventory device, the number of items per store. For a smart car, the mileage of different cars.
Time Series	Field Filters Name	Use a time series to measure events over time. Examples: network errors sales
Histogram	Field Filters Name	Use histograms to analyze and understand the distribution of large sets of numerical data. Examples: The distribution of network request duration. For a smart home device, the distribution of temperatures.
Number	Field Filters Name	Use a number graph to highlight an important data point. Examples: active devices sales total network errors
Table	Field Filters Name	Use a table to view detailed data for a list of similar items. Examples: customers network requests devices
Geo	Field Filters Name	Use the Geo widget to analyze and understand performance across geographic areas. Examples: Sales in different countries, regions, and cities Network request durations across countries, regions, and cities Device errors in different countries, regions, and cities

How to Use Filters

Filters enable you to narrow your results to meaningful information. For example, suppose you wanted to see the total number of items sold at each store, but you were particularly interested in those more expensive items. You could choose a bar graph and use the field Device Name and the subfield Annual Mileage with the filter Location: Quebec, Canada to view the average annual mileage of cars in Quebec, Canada, as shown in the example widget: