Introducing Custom Dashboards: Your Data, Your Way

By: Etan Lightstone | Posted in: New & Noteworthy, Product Updates, Top Post, Jun. 25th, 2012

Since the dawn of distributed computing, one of the top feature requests from users of Application Performance Management (APM) tools has been the ability to customize the interface. Why? Because every app is different — connected to different backend systems, connected to different third-party services, and deployed on different platforms.

Likewise, every dev, deployment and ops team is different. Depending on your role in the organization, you want views of application performance that matter to you, and that fit with your process and priorities. The problem though is that customizing the UI within your APM tool has traditionally been difficult and clunky. You have to transform yourself into a UI designer and HTML expert, and then spend hours or days configuring dashboards to get the views you want. And while we think our customization is easier than the other tools, we also felt like there was plenty of room for improvement. That’s why we created custom dashboards, a new feature that makes customizing New Relic as simple as a point and click and drag-and-drop.

How Does It Work?
With Custom Dashboards you can build any dashboard you want — with no coding required. The easiest way to get started is to just copy an existing New Relic chart into your first Custom Dashboard. When you hover over a graph, the End User Monitoring Overview for example, you’ll see an option to “Add to Custom Dashboard.” Just click on that and presto — you’ve got your first Custom Dashboard. From there, you can add whatever charts or tables you want  (And copying server monitoring charts works too!). You can select from a variety of performance metrics to build out your Custom Dashboards. If you’re collecting Custom Metrics, you can easily visualize those metrics. As you add more charts and graphs to your Custom Dashboard, you can easily rearrange them by dragging and dropping to get the charts in the order you want. If you’re monitoring multiple apps with New Relic, another cool feature is that you can add charts from multiple apps on a single dashboard. For example, if you are monitoring three apps, you could create a single dashboard that has the End User Monitoring Overview charts for each of those apps on the same dashboard. It’s a great way to keep your eye on end user response time for all you apps with just a quick glance at your dashboard while you’re busy coding up your next project. For more information, check out our documentation.

Take Custom Dashboards for a spin today!