Overview of the Console Dashboards Service

Here's a list of basic concepts for the Console Dashboards service.

Dashboard

A dashboard is a collection of visualizations that let you monitor resources, diagnostics, and key metrics for your tenancy. Dashboards are fully customizable: you define the widgets, behavior, and IAM policies. OCI treats dashboards as resources: dashboards have OCIDs, adhere to IAM policies, and reside in compartments. See Managing Console Dashboards for more information.

Dashboard Group

Dashboard groups let you share collections of dashboards with designated groups of people. For example, each team within an organization can have its own dashboard group. A dashboard group is an OCI resource with its own OCID. See Working with Console Dashboards Groups for more information.

Default Dashboard

The first time you visit the Dashboard tab, you are presented a default dashboard and sample widgets that contain instructions for getting started with widgets. This dashboard is used as an example and doesn't start with the full functionality of a regular dashboard. For example, it doesn't have a Dashboards actions menu, and you cannot delete it. You can personalize the dashboard by editing its layout or adding more widgets. Once you save your changes, or create a new dashboard, the initial settings are lost. For more detailed instructions, see Managing Console Dashboards and Configuring Widgets.

After your tenancy has a saved dashboard, your most recently viewed dashboard becomes the default dashboard. The initial default dashboard with sample widgets is inaccessible unless all other dashboards have been deleted.

Widget

A widget is a single data visualization from one data source. Widgets can display information about inventory, usage, billing, alerts, outages, and more. You can create multiple widgets and use them to build dashboards. For more information, see Configuring Widgets.

Dashboard Template

When you create a new dashboard, you can choose from a selection of dashboard templates that are preconfigured with a set of widgets for specific use cases. For example, the Audit logs template includes widgets that show you active user count, user activity, activity trends, activity by compartment, and other activity logs. Other templates focus on costs, metrics, or logs for Compute, Object Storage, VCN, and other services.

Dashboards support the following types of widget:

• Infrastructure Billing Widget: This widget shows current billing cycle information. You can only include a single instance of the infrastructure billing widget in your dashboard.

• Cost Management Widget: This widget helps you track and optimize your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure spending by generating charts with aggregated Cost Analysis data. You can include multiple cost management widgets in your dashboard.

• Logging Chart Widget: This widget allows you to create visualizations with data from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging service. You can include multiple logging chart widgets in your dashboard.

• Logging Data Table Widget: This widget allows you to display a table of the data stored in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging service. You can include multiple logging data table widgets in your dashboard.

• Markdown Widget: This widget lets you add and format text-based content. You can include multiple markdown widgets in your dashboard.

• Monitoring Widget: This widget lets you view and compare metrics from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring service. You can include multiple monitoring widgets in your dashboard.

• Resource Explorer Widget: This widget allows you to view resources by compartment. You can only include a single instance of the resource explorer widget in your dashboard.

• Resource Query Widget: This widget allows you to use queries to get detailed information about specific resources. You can filter by region, compartment, resource type, or write an advanced query using Search Language Syntax.

For more information about widgets, see Configuring Widgets. For general steps explaining how to add widgets to dashboards, see Managing Widgets.

For general information about using the API, see REST APIs.

Most types of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources have a unique, Oracle-assigned identifier called an Oracle Cloud ID (OCID). For information about the OCID format and other ways to identify your resources, see Resource Identifiers.

Use Monitoring to query metrics and manage alarms. Metrics and alarms help monitor the health, capacity, and performance of your cloud resources.

For a list of applicable limits and instructions for requesting a limit increase, see Service Limits. To set compartment-specific limits on a resource or resource family, administrators can use compartment quotas.