Dashboards
Dashboards in ControlCom Connect provide a visual representation of your IoT data, allowing you to monitor, analyze, and share insights from your connected devices and assets.
What are Dashboards
Dashboards are customizable visual interfaces that display real-time and historical data from your IoT devices and assets. They serve as a central hub for monitoring your IoT ecosystem, providing at-a-glance visibility into key metrics, trends, and status information.
In ControlCom Connect, dashboards are customizable to meet your specific monitoring needs, interactive for exploring data through visualizations, and update in real-time as new data arrives. They can be shared with team members and stakeholders, and are responsive for access from any device with a web browser.
Dashboards help you transform raw IoT data into actionable insights by presenting information in a visually intuitive format. They enable you to monitor device and asset status in real-time, track key performance indicators, identify trends and patterns over time, detect anomalies and potential issues, and make data-driven decisions.
Dashboards
Dashboards are purpose-built for specific monitoring needs. They can be created for various purposes, such as device monitoring, asset tracking, process visualization, compliance reporting, and executive summaries.
Common dashboards can be organized and shared based on your organization's needs, with options to control visibility and access permissions.
Dashboard Elements
Dashboards in ControlCom Connect are built using a variety of elements that display different types of data and visualizations:
Generic Elements
Generic elements provide flexibility for displaying various types of data. They can be configured to show text, numbers, or simple visualizations, making them versatile components for dashboard design.
Status Elements
Status elements display the current state of devices, assets, or processes. They use visual indicators such as colors, icons, and labels to communicate status information at a glance, making it easy to identify which items require attention.
List Elements
List elements display collections of variables in a tabular format. They are ideal for showing multiple data points side by side, comparing values across different variables, and providing detailed information in a structured layout.
Graph Elements
Graph elements visualize data over time, allowing you to track trends and patterns, compare multiple variables, identify anomalies, and analyze historical performance. Graph types include line charts for time-series data, bar charts for comparative analysis, area charts for cumulative values, and scatter plots for correlation analysis.
Radial Elements
Radial elements display percentage-based metrics using circular gauges. They are ideal for progress indicators, utilization metrics, completion status, and performance against targets. The visual nature of radial elements makes them perfect for quick assessment of key metrics.
Control Elements
Control elements allow users to interact with devices directly from the dashboard. They enable sending commands to devices, adjusting settings and parameters, triggering actions and workflows, and controlling equipment remotely.
Map Elements
Map elements provide geographical visualization of your devices and assets. They enable viewing device locations on interactive maps, monitoring geographically distributed assets, tracking movement and location changes, and visualizing regional performance metrics.
Menu Elements
Menu elements provide navigation options within dashboards. They can be used to create interactive dashboard experiences with multiple views, sections, or pages, allowing users to navigate between different data visualizations or dashboard sections.
Section Elements
Section elements help organize dashboard content into logical groups. They provide visual separation between different parts of a dashboard, improving readability and user experience by creating a clear information hierarchy.
Diagram Elements
Diagram elements display visual representations of systems, processes, or relationships. They can show equipment layouts, process flows, network topologies, or other visual models that help users understand complex systems at a glance.
Component Elements
Component elements allow other widgets to be shared across multiple dashboards as the same instance. This promotes reusability and consistency, as changes to a component are reflected across all dashboards where it's used.
IFrame Elements
IFrame elements embed external web content directly into dashboards. They can incorporate third-party visualizations, web applications, or other web-based resources, extending dashboard capabilities beyond native elements.
Logic Elements
Logic elements (currently in Alpha) provide conditional display and data processing capabilities. They can show different content based on data values, user roles, or other conditions, enabling more dynamic and responsive dashboards.
Creating Dashboards
To create a new dashboard in ControlCom Connect:
- Navigate to the Dashboards section in the main navigation
- Click the "+" button to create a new dashboard
- Enter a name for your dashboard
- Select the dashboard type (Home or Common)
- Choose visibility settings (Public or Private)
- Optionally, associate the dashboard with a specific device
- Click "Create" to generate your new dashboard
Once created, you'll be taken to the dashboard editor where you can add and configure elements.
Dashboard Editor
The dashboard editor provides a drag-and-drop interface for designing your dashboard. It includes a layout grid for arranging elements in a responsive grid layout, an element palette for selecting from available element types, a configuration panel for customizing element settings and data sources, a preview mode for testing your dashboard before publishing, and responsive controls for optimizing for different screen sizes.
Customizing Dashboards
ControlCom Connect offers extensive customization options for your dashboards:
Layout Customization
Dashboard layouts can be customized with grid arrangement for positioning elements in a flexible grid layout, element sizing for adjusting the size of individual elements, responsive behavior for defining how elements adapt to different screen sizes, and grouping for organizing related elements into logical sections.
Visual Customization
Visual aspects of dashboards can be customized with color schemes to match your branding, typography adjustments for readability and emphasis, icons and symbols as visual indicators to enhance understanding, and background options for customizing dashboard backgrounds.
Data Configuration
Data configuration options include connecting elements to device variables and assets, controlling how frequently data is updated, setting default time periods for historical data, choosing how data is summarized (average, sum, min/max, etc.), and defining value ranges for color-coding and alerts.
Interactive Features
Interactive features enhance dashboard usability with tooltips for hover information on data points, drill-down capabilities for deeper exploration of data, filtering options to focus on specific data, and cross-element interaction for coordinated analysis.
Dashboard Sharing
ControlCom Connect provides several options for sharing dashboards with others:
Visibility Settings
Visibility settings control who can access dashboards. Public dashboards are visible to all users in your organization, private dashboards are visible only to you and users you specifically share with, and device-limited dashboards are associated with specific devices and visible to users with access to those devices.
User Permissions
User permissions define what actions others can take with shared dashboards. View permissions allow users to see the dashboard but not modify it, edit permissions allow users to make changes to the dashboard layout and configuration, and manage permissions allow users to control sharing and permissions for the dashboard.