Workspaces
This feature is available with a Pro or Enterprise plan
Use workspaces to model your teams and entities, and the dependencies between them, to enable greater collaboration and knowledge sharing. A workspace may represent an application, a service, a component, a team… it's completely up to you.
Each workspace has its own:
Workspace home page
If you have the Default page option set to Workspace overview in the workspace settings, then the workspace home is displayed whenever you navigate to a workspace (after configuring a data source).The workspace home presents an overview of the dashboards, monitors, data sources and health states within a workspace. This information is displayed across the following sections:
- Health: The Health section lets you to view the rolled-up health state of the monitors and dashboards within your workspace. Use the filters at the top of the section to toggle between Monitors and Dashboards view and then use the adjacent Sort and State filters to control what is displayed. Click a monitor or dashboard in the list to open it. See What are status rollups?
- Data Sources: The Data Sources section displays a list containing each of the data sources configured for the workspace, in addition to the Status of the data source and the count of objects it includes. Click a data source name to quickly open the corresponding overview page.
- KPIs: The KPIs section lets you see all the KPIs in this workspace at-a-glance. See KPIs.
- Map: The Map section displays an interactive model of the dependencies with this workspace. See Map for more information.
How to add, edit and delete workspaces
From the Settings > Workspaces tab you can view, add, edit, and delete workspaces.
How to add or edit a workspace
- You can add a new workspace from either:
- Settings > Workspaces > Add workspace.
- + Create workspace after clicking on the dropdown next to the current workspace name on the left-hand menu.
- You can edit workspace settings from either:
- Settings > Workspaces then either click the Edit workspace icon next to the workspace name, or click the workspace name on the left-hand menu.
- Go to the workspace overview page (accessed by clicking on the workspace name on the left-hand menu) and click the top Workspace settings button.
- Name:
Enter the name you want to give the workspace. - Description:
Optionally, enter a description of the workspace. - Icon:
Optionally, you can upload an image for the workspace. The image will appear across the application such as on the home page, workspace home and maps - Type:
Optionally, you can give the workspace a type from the dropdown list. This can be used for grouping, filtering or searching, for example from the Organization home page, see Organization home. - Tags:
Optionally, you can give the workspace one or more tags from the dropdown list. These can be used for grouping, filtering or searching, for example from the Organization home page, see Organization home. - Default page:
Choose the page which is shown first when someone browses to this workspace.
Choose from:- Workspace overview: Sets the default landing page to your workspace dashboard collection. This is the default option used when creating a new workspace.
- First dashboard in the list: Sets the default landing page to the first dashboard listed in the left-hand nav bar.
- Optionally, configure the following on the Access Control tab:
Restrict access to this workspace:
Optionally, enable this toggle to limit who can access this workspace. See Access ControlAllow view-only link sharing for all dashboards in this workspace:
When Sharing is enabled for the organization the Allow dashboard sharing toggle is shown and can be enabled or disabled for the workspace. Sharing allows dashboards in the workspace to be shared with anyone. See Sharing. - Optionally, configure the following on the Advanced tab:
Links:
The Links section tells you how many workspaces the new workspace will be linked to. Workspaces will automatically be linked to the new workspace based on their permission settings. See Workspace linking.
Show workspaces:
Click this to view all workspaces that are linked to this workspace.
You can remove linked workspaces by selecting x next to the desired workspace.
You can add linked workspaces by typing their name. - Click Add or Save.
How to delete a workspace
- Go to Settings > Workspaces.
- Click the Delete workspace icon next to the workspace that you want to delete.
- Click Delete.
How to organize a workspace
This short 47 second video shows you how to move dashboards within your workspace:
What are status rollups?
When you configure a monitor on a tile, this allows you to set what makes that tile red, amber or green.
For more information on configuring monitoring see Monitors.
The status of the tile will then automatically roll up to the dashboard, and to the workspace. So if a tile turns red, so does the dashboard and workspace.
The red, amber or green status indicators mean you can instantly see if everything is ok or if something needs your attention.
Your Organization home page shows the state of each workspace.
This short video (2 mins 20) shows status roll-ups in SquaredUp:
Getting notifications of monitor state changes
SquaredUp can alert you when the state of any monitor changes by sending notifications.
More about Notifications
Workspace Settings
Admin users can also manage workspaces from Settings > Workspaces. This page provides a single place to manage all of your workspaces. You are able to add, edit, delete and navigate to workspaces from this page.
Access control
You can control access to workspaces by configuring permissions, where you can assign Viewer, Editor or Full Control access to users or groups. If you do not set permissions when creating a workspace, then anyone will be able to view, edit and administer it.
Access control is configured in the Access Control tab of the Edit Workspace window, and is enabled via the Restrict access to this workspace toggle. By default, Restrict access to this workspace is set to off, meaning that the workspace can be viewed, edited and administered by anyone. Enable this toggle to manage access to a workspace.When using the Restrict access to this workspace fields to control who has access to the workspace:
- By default, the user setting the permissions for the workspace will be given Full Control and the Everyone group will be given Viewer permissions.
- Tailor access to the workspace, by selecting individual users or user groups from the dropdown and giving them Viewer, Editor or Full Control permissions.
- If the user is not available from the dropdown, you can invite them to the workspace by typing in their email address and then clicking Add. The new user is sent an email inviting them to create an account on SquaredUp. Once the account has been created they will gain access to the organization. See Users and Groups
Administrators have special ‘administrative’ access to all workspaces. This means they see all workspaces listed under Settings > Workspaces, and they can modify workspace properties, including the ACL, for any workspace.
Administrators do not see all workspaces in the main dashboarding area of SquaredUp, and do not have any access to the contents of workspaces unless they add themselves to the workspace ACL.
Workspace linking
Each workspace is linked to a set of data sources. These data sources are the only data sources that the workspace can read data from.
Data source ACLs are mainly used to restrict the users that can link a data source to workspace - once the data source is linked it is accessible to anyone with access to the workspace. Control over access to data source data is mainly controlled through workspace permissions, not permissions on the data source itself.
This means that all users with access to a workspace are guaranteed to be able to see everything in the workspace, regardless of their permissions on data sources used to populate it. Similarly, any monitoring and alerting is based on this same fixed view of the data. This is particularly important with scopes that match across multiple data sources.
Each workspace can also be linked to a set of other workspaces, for the same reason. The linked workspaces can be accessed to read workspace resources like state or KPIs. Again, this ensures any user viewing state or KPI tiles sees the same data as everyone else with access to the workspace.
Linking is performed automatically where possible. If access control is never enabled for any workspace or data source, linking is completely automatic.
The scenarios where linking occurs automatically are:
- Any new workspace is automatically linked to all workspaces and data sources that are accessible to everyone.
- Any new data source is automatically linked to all existing workspaces that are accessible to everyone, if the data source is accessible to everyone.
- Any new workspace is automatically linked to all existing workspaces that are accessible to everyone, if the new workspace is accessible to everyone.
- When a user asks to create a new workspace for a new data source, the workspace is linked to the data source.
- When a user adds a downstream workspace on the Monitoring page, the downstream workspace is automatically linked.
When users start restricting access to workspaces and/or data sources, manual linking becomes necessary in some cases.
For example, if user 1 adds a new data source and restricts Link to workspace permissions to only user 2, there will be no automatic linking of the data source to any workspaces. If user 2 wants to use the data source in their workspace, they will need to add the link. The link can be added through the workspace configuration, or by clicking on the data source in the Quick Scope editor.