The Dashboard

The dashboard is the first thing you see when you sign in to GridNMS. It pulls together the most important signals about your network — what’s up, what’s down, what just changed, and what needs attention — into a single screen you can scan in seconds.

The dashboard shows device status and open events at a glance.

What you’ll find here

The dashboard is built from panels. Each panel is a self-contained widget that shows one kind of information. A fresh install comes with a sensible default layout, and you can rearrange, add, or remove panels to suit how your team works.

Common panels include:

Panel	What it shows
Device status	A breakdown of how many devices are Up, Down, or Unknown, usually as a donut or stat card.
Recent events	The most recent events, color-coded by severity.
Open cases	Your active cases — the investigations actually being worked, worst severity first.
Recent changes	Devices that recently went up or down, interfaces that flapped, and other state transitions.
Upcoming maintenance	Planned maintenance windows so you know which devices are expected to be offline.
Top event sources	The devices generating the most events — a quick way to spot a noisy or failing device.
Top log sources	The hosts sending the most log volume over the last 24 hours.
Metric graphs	Live charts for traffic, CPU, memory, and other monitored metrics.

Tip

Open cases and Top event sources are the two most useful panels for daily triage. If a device is misbehaving, it will usually show up in both.

Reading device status

The device status panel uses three states, the same ones used throughout GridNMS:

• Up — the device is reachable and responding to monitoring.
• Down — the device failed its reachability check and is considered offline.
• Unknown — GridNMS has not yet been able to determine the device’s state (for example, it was just added, or its collector is offline).

Clicking any segment or number takes you straight to a filtered device list so you can see exactly which devices are in that state.

The Site selector

If your organization has more than one site, a Site selector appears at the top of the page. Use it to scope the entire dashboard — and most other pages — to a single location, or choose All sites to see everything together. This is handy when different teams own different buildings, campuses, or regions.

Note

The site you pick is remembered as you move between pages, so you stay focused on one location until you change it.

Global search (Cmd/Ctrl+K)

Press Cmd+K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Windows/Linux) anywhere in GridNMS to open global search. Start typing a device name, IP address, interface, or page name and jump straight there. It’s the fastest way to pull up a specific device without clicking through menus.

Customizing your dashboard

You can shape the dashboard to match what your team needs to watch.

Add a panel

1. Click Customize (or Edit layout) in the top-right of the dashboard.
2. Click Add Panel.
3. Choose a panel type from the list and confirm.
4. The new panel appears at the bottom of the layout, ready to be positioned.

Adding a graph or metric panel

Beyond the built-in status panels, you can add graph panels that chart a device’s monitored metrics — traffic, errors, packets, CPU, a service’s response time — right on the dashboard.

The most direct way to create one is from the Device Metrics page:

1. Go to Explore → Device Metrics and pick the device (and, for traffic, the interface) you want to chart.
2. Choose the metric and the time range you’d like the chart to cover — for example, Traffic on an uplink over the last 24 hours.
3. Pin the chart to a dashboard. It’s added as a graph panel on that dashboard, ready to position like any other.

Once a graph panel is on a dashboard, open its menu (the ⋯ / Cog icon in its corner) to:

• Change its time range (1h, 6h, 24h, 7d, 30d) so the panel always shows the window you care about.
• Set its column span to make a busy chart wider.
• Copy it to another dashboard, or unpin it.

The panel library you reach through Add Panel also lists the other panel types you can drop onto any dashboard:

Panel type	What it shows
Device Status	Up / Down / Unknown counts and recently-down devices.
Recent Events	The latest events by severity.
Open Cases	Your active cases — investigations and correlated incidents.
Recent Changes	The latest configuration and state changes.
Upcoming Maintenance	Scheduled maintenance windows.
Top Event Sources	The devices generating the most events.
Top Log Sources	The hosts sending the most log volume in the last 24 hours.
Service Status	Rollup health across your monitored services, plus a 24-hour status timeline per service.
Collector Status	A row per collector — online state, version, heartbeat age, the devices it owns, and 24-hour CPU, memory, and log-volume sparklines.
Log Forwarder Status	Delivery health of your log forwarders, with any offline ones called out.
Graph / metric panels	Live charts for a device metric or service latency (pinned from Device Metrics).

The Service Status, Collector Status, and Log Forwarder Status panels are off until you add them — like every panel, they are opt-in rather than assumed.

Reading the Service Status panel

Beyond the up / degraded / down / unknown counts, the panel lists your services worst-first (down before degraded before unknown), each with a 24-hour status timeline so you can see at a glance whether a service has been solidly up or flapping. Click a service to open it; view all goes to the full Service Monitoring page. Only the first few services are listed, so the panel stays readable on a wall display.

Reading the Collector Status panel

Each collector gets a row with its site, version, how long since its last heartbeat, how many of its devices are up and down, how many log forwarders report through it, and small CPU, memory, and logs/hour charts covering the last 24 hours. Underneath, an Issues list calls out anything that needs attention — a collector that is unhealthy, one whose configuration failed to apply or is still pending, and devices that are down.

A metric GridNMS has not measured shows as —, never as a zero. That distinction matters: 0 means “measured, and it really is zero”, while — means “no reading yet” — so an idle collector never looks the same as an unreachable one.

Tip

Build a capacity view dashboard made entirely of graph panels — pin the traffic chart for each uplink and core link from the Metrics page, give them a wide column span, and set a 7-day range to watch trends.

Rearrange and resize

While in customize mode:

• Drag and drop any panel by its title bar to reorder the layout.
• Resize a panel by changing its column span — narrow panels sit side by side, while a full-width panel spans the whole row. Stat cards work well narrow; event feeds and charts usually want more width.

Per-panel refresh interval

Each panel can refresh on its own schedule. Open a panel’s menu (the ⋯ icon in its corner) and set how often it should reload its data — for example, every 30 seconds for the open-events feed, or every 5 minutes for a slower-moving inventory count. Faster refresh keeps data current; slower refresh is lighter on busy displays.

Save and exit

When the layout looks right, click Done or Save. Your changes are stored to your account, so the dashboard looks the same the next time you sign in.

Multiple saved dashboards

You can keep more than one dashboard and switch between them from the dashboard selector at the top of the page. This lets you build purpose-specific views — for example:

• An NOC wallboard with large status cards and the open-events feed.
• A capacity view full of traffic and utilization charts.
• A per-site view scoped to one building for the team that runs it.

Create a new dashboard from the selector menu, give it a name, lay out its panels, and save. Switching between them is instant.

Tip

Build a stripped-down, high-contrast dashboard for any TV or wall display in your operations room — just status cards and the open-events feed, with a fast refresh interval.

Where to go next

• See every device and drill into one in Devices & Inventory.
• Triage alerts and work investigations on Events & Alerts and Cases.
• Understand how status is determined in How Monitoring Works.