Monitoring a tile
With monitors in place, you can automatically track key metrics, detect unusual patterns, and trigger alerts the instant predefined conditions are met. This helps your team respond faster to and stay ahead of potential issues, before they become problems.
This article teaches you how to add a monitor to a tile, explains how monitoring enables health rollups across your workspace, and outlines the next steps to leveling up your operational intelligence.
See Monitors for a deeper look and help with specific configuration settings.
How does monitoring work?
When you add a monitor to a tile, you are essentially mapping a health state to your specified object(s), which updates whenever a certain condition is met. This could be through monitoring some existing state provided by a data stream, or by adding a threshold you personally define for a metric (e.g. when a response time goes over 100ms).
Health states are represented by the following signals and colors:
- 🟢Success: Green
- 🟡Warning: Yellow
- 🔴Error: Red
- ⚫Unknown: Grey
Where RollUp fits in
Because your dashboards form part of a structured Map, they can share their data and signals with other dashboards around them (so even when you're not looking at them, they're serving a purpose!).
Hierarchically, a tile's health rolls up to the health of the dashboard it lives on, and that dashboard health rolls up to the workspace it lives in. Basically, this means that when a tile turns red, the dashboard it lives on turns red and so does the workspace that the dashboard lives is.
This lets you immediately visualize when something's not right in your environment, and lets you drill down into your workspace and dashboard to find the problem tile and objects.
Adding your first monitor
The tutorials carries directly on from building your first dashboard.
In this tutorial, you’ll be walked through adding monitors to a Release Status tiles, so that you can immediately see when something goes wrong with a build.
- Navigate to your Release Status dashboard.
- Hover over the Release Status Dev tile and select More > Edit from the top-right corner. The Tile Editor opens.
- Select the Monitoring tab in the right-hand panel.
- Toggle Monitoring to On. This enables monitoring for the tile and displays the configuration fields.
- Click Save to enable your changes and return to the dashboard view.
And it's as easy as that! Because SquaredUp was able to automatically map a State value when it determined the visualization, once you enabled monitoring it also automatically mapped the monitoring Type to State and and selected that value as the monitored Column.
Now, to complete your monitored dashboard, repeat steps 2-4 for your Release Status Prod tile.
Nice work! You should now have a dashboard with two monitored tiles, both rolling up their health state to the dashboard.
You'll notice that your tiles now have a colored circle in the top-left corner, representing the overall health of the tile. Likewise, your dashboard has a colored circle to the left of its title, representing the rolled up health state.
If you look at the left-hand nav bar, you'll see the dashboard health is also reflected here, and that it's even being rolled up to the health of the workspace!
Next steps
This article is just a taster of what is possible with monitoring. There are many more ways to configure monitors (see Monitors for a deep dive), and you can also supply your own monitor condition scripts for absolute control.
Notifications
Once a monitor is set up you can configure automatic notifications to trigger when a tile enters a certain state. This lets you alert yourself and your team to an issue the moment it arises (via email, Slack, Teams, Zapier, webhooks, and more!).
Although not part of this tutorial set, you can have a go at adding an email destination and then setting a notification rule to notify yourself with changes to your dashboard (be warned that the sample data cycles states frequently, so be sure to disable the notifications once you've had a go).
Share your dashboard!
Now you've gone through all that effort to create a beautiful, functional, operationally intelligent dashboard (although lets be honest, it was pretty easy) it's time to share that dashboard with the world.
Continue to sharing a dashboard when you're ready to continue to the next step.