After you’ve successfully connected your data sources and organized your widgets, another question emerges: what features will you use to drive interaction with your AppInsights dashboards? We offer a variety of complimentary features that facilitate dashboard viewing, sharing, and customization -- it’s up to you which ones you’d like to leverage.
Below is a quick recap of these features, along with direct links to their individual tutorials...
>>Basic Styling
For simple stylistic dashboard modifications like changing your background or adding your company logo, navigate to our Basic Styling menu (found in the main Settings menu - Gear Icon, top right).
Basic Styling: Changing dashboard theme options
>>Advanced Styling
For advanced stylistic changes like font, widget background color, borders, etc, navigate to our Advanced Styling menu (requires use of CSS stylesheet language).
Advanced Styling: Using custom CSS to style your dashboards
>>Share links & Collections
If you’re interested in sharing a live dashboard with a colleague or customer without offering editing privileges, you’ll want to use our share link feature. Share links are also ideal for representing a dashboard permanently in a company lobby, conference room, or call center as they simply require an active browser tab for proper representation.
You can create share-links for individual dashboards -- each with a unique URL -- or create a dashboard folder with a corresponding share link that will cycle through each live dashboard at a specified interval. Thorough instructions on both options can be viewed by following the link below:
Dashboard Folders: How To Navigate, Manage, And Share Groups Of Dashboards
>>IP Whitelisting
IP whitelisting can be used as a security precaution to ensure that only users attempting to access your AppInsights dashboard(s) from a specific IP (or set of IP’s) can gain access. From the “IP Whitelisting” menu you can add multiple IP Addresses and give them unique descriptions for reference purposes. Thorough instructions below:
IP Whitelisting: limiting access to your AppInsights dashboards
>>User management
Depending on the number of additional users that can be added to your account -- determined by your plan type -- you can invite a number of your colleagues to access your AppInsights account. When adding new users, you will be required to apply one of the following permission levels:
Owner -- same editing privileges as primary account admin
View & Edit -- full editing privileges but unable to invite additional users
View Only -- no editing or invitation privileges
For “view & edit” or “view only” users, an added level of security allows you to limit access to specific dashboards, or even specific authentications. Thorough instructions below:
User Management: How to add additional users to your AppInsights account
>>Data export
If you’re interested in interacting with your AppInsights widget data using other tools, you can easily export data to a CSV spreadsheet. Please note that the export history will vary depending on the widget in question. A standard number widget might only provide a single data point, while a line graph that has been populated over many months will be represented by a larger data-set within your exported spreadsheet.
The specifics of each visualization’s “data memory” can be found in our widget technical specs support doc.
For users that are interested in exporting data dynamically using our custom API, please refer to the API documentation for comprehensive instructions.
>>Alerts
Monitor plan or above
Setting up alerts for your widgets ensures that you’re immediately notified when a goal is reached, or a KPI falls below an acceptable threshold. To begin setting up widget alerts, start by navigating to the primary AppInsights settings icon and selecting the “Alerts” menu. Using the data stream identifier for your widget(s), you can set unique alert(s) based on a goal or threshold for your KPI. There is no limit to the number of alerts you can set or the number of recipients for the notification. Full instructions can be found below:
Alerts: Setting Email Notifications For Your Widgets
>>Scheduled reports
Report plan or above
Our scheduled reports feature allows you to send an email with an attached image of your dashboard. You can send a one-time email, or you can automate a scheduled email that will send every week (or multiple times a week) at a day / time that you specify. To get started, open the share menu at the top right of your AppInsights dashboard.
For detailed, step-by-step instructions please check out our snapshot tutorials:
Reports: Send An Image Or PDF Of Your Dashboard Via Email
Scheduled Reports: Send An Image Or PDF Of Your Dashboard Via An Automated Email
>>Collaboration
Engage plan or above
Once multiple users have access to your AppInsights dashboards, it’s only a matter of time before questions and commentary around your KPIs begin to emerge. Our “Collaboration” feature was created with this in mind, and empowers users to initiate dialogue within AppInsights by adding comments to specific widgets. These comments can be made by, and are visible to, all users on your account with ownership and view & edit privileges. All comment history is also saved so you can catch up on recent AppInsights conversations you might have missed.
For more information on adding comments to your AppInsights widgets, check out the tutorial below:
Collaboration: posting and viewing comments
[AppInsights] Getting Started - Step 4: AppInsights features overview
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