Organize dashboards with team

Let’s assume you have deploy a xobserve server in your Company, as the time goes on, you will have more and more dashboards and users.

In this case, you may want to organize your dashboards with different groups, so that you and other admins/users can easily manage them.

This kind group is called Team in xObserve.

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Why we need teams

In a company, there is usually a team called ops, which is responsible for the operation and maintenance of the infrastructures, such as servers, databases, netword etc.

If the ops team uses xObserve, they may want to create a team to manage their dashboards, because they probably don’t care the dashboards about business.

Therefore, we can create a team called ops, and add all the ops users to this team, and associated server, network dashboards with this team.

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Create a ops team

1. Click configuration icon in the bottom section of sidebar and select Team tab.

2. Click New Team button in the top right corner
3. Fill in Team Name field with ops
4. Click Submit button

That’s unbelievable easy.

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Add users to ops team

Every team should has its own admins and users, so that they can manage and view their dashboards.

Let’s add xobserve-admin to ops team, add give him the admin role.

In fact, if a user is Admin in global team, he is also the admin of xObserve, so we can get a conclusion: global admins are also the admins of all teams.

1. Select Member tab in ops team page and click New member button

2. Login with xobserve-admin to complete next steps.

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Create a dashboard

Now, let’s create a dashboard for ops team.

Select Dashboard tab in ops team page, and click the New Dashboard button. It seems there is no difference than before.

But if you look at Belong to team field, you can find that value has automatically set to ops team rather than the previous global team.

Sure, you can change it to global team, but this is no sense for our cases, so keep it to opt team.

Click Submit button to create our Network stat dashboard.

Look at the top left corner of the new dashboard, there shows that our new Network stat is ops team , great! Try to click on ops text and see what happens.

As this is just for demonstration purpose, we will not create any charts in this dashboard, but you can do it by yourself.

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Transfer dashbaord to ops team

First dashboard is ok, let’s get the second one, this time , we are not creating a dashboard, we want to get back our rightfully dashboard : Hosts info dashboard, because it’s all about servers :)

So we need to transfer that dashboard to ops team, but xObserve does not privide any transfer operation at this moment, we need to find a way to do this.

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Dashboard meta data

In xobserve, all settings include panel settings are described in a JSON format, we call that: dashboard meta data.

If you are familiar with these settings, you can modify dashboard settings directly in meta data.

Because there is no other way to transfer dashboard to a team, we have to modify the ownedBy field in meta data.

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Modify meta data

First, we need to know the team id of ops: visit /cfg/teams page, and get it from teams table.

In this situation, id of ops should be 2, because we have not created any teams yet, and id of global team is 1.

1. Visit Hosts info dashboard and open its settings modal.
2. Select Meta data tab
3. Set the value of ownedBy field to 2

4. Click Submit button

Go back to dashboard page, you should see :

This means we have successfully transferred Hosts info dashboard to ops team.

To ensure that, you can open search panel to see if Hosts info dashboard is in ops team.

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Create sidebar

Now, we have two dashboards in ops team, but we can’t see them in sidebar, visit by search is not a good choice, especially for enterprise use cases.

So let’s created a sidebar for ops team.

1. Click configuration icon in sidebar and select Team tab
2. Click manage button on ops row
3. Select Side menu tab

You can see there is already a menu item navigate to Home dashboard, but why can’t we see it?

Don’t worry, we will cover it later, for now, just create our sidebar menu items.

Now, sidebar for ops team has been created, but we are still using the sidebar from global menu.

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Switch sidebar

To use the new ops sidebar, we need to switch the sidebar to ops.

Click user icon at bottom of sidebar and hover on Select sidemenu item,you should see :

You see, just click the ops item, and the sidebar will be switched to ops.

Once selected, each time you access xObserve, the sidebar will be ops sidebar, until you switch to another sidebar.