Announcing The New Plumbr Dashboard

Announcing an update to the Plumbr product – the new and improved “Plumbr Dashboard”. 

Most monitoring tools offer basic snapshots of the health of your applications. But when you’re dealing with dozens of apps or APIs which are making millions of transactions each day, a snapshot does not go a long way in communicating what you need to know. 

That’s why we offer our customers intuitive dashboards that let you view essential APIs and applications that need to be kept an eye on.

You can now pin ‘cards’ to the Dashboard that will provide you the summary of availability and performance of specific applications (or APIs) that are monitored. The Plumbr Dashboard is designed to be a single source of truth for all stakeholders within an organization. The new dashboard is built with the main purpose of providing a detailed overview of the availability and performance of each application (or API backend). 

How it works

• 📍Pin the applications and APIs to our dashboard for which you need constant awareness
• ⚠️ Select acceptable thresholds for these metrics to get colour-coded information on the performance of your apps
• 👥 Invite other users depending on which apps you want or need them to have access to

Why are we making these changes?

There are several reasons why we are bringing in these changes. The important ones among them are:

1. The earlier version of the dashboard was unable to provide a clear separation between applications and their scope. 
2. Different engineering and business teams wanted to be in charge of their specific applications. 
3. Actionable information that was specific to individual applications was difficult to obtain. 

Due to these reasons, and input from our customers about wanting to see information about their extensive monitoring needs required us to redesign the product experience. 

Another important reason for making these changes was to provide a clear separation between real user monitoring being done on the frontend and application performance monitoring of APIs. All engineering teams require a clear distinction between what is exactly being monitored – whether it is user experience which is the focus for an application, or the performance of the backend API.  Having a dashboard helps with creating this clear separation for engineers who are dependant on Plumbr. 

Other Allied Changes

While we’re rolling out the new Dashboard, we are deprecating one older feature – Filters. We are going to remove filters that existed within the product. Users were using filters so far to separate monitoring data collected from different applications and APIs. This was cumbersome and non-intuitive. We believe that introducing the new dashboard will eliminate the need for these filters altogether. 

One dependency this introduces is in the form of monthly reports. All reports that were being set out from Plumbr were based on the filters that were created. Going forward, all the reports sent at the beginning of each month will be for each application (or APIs) pinned to the dashboard. 

A New User Experience

Overall, the new dashboard represents a refreshed experience of the whole product. It allows engineers to see whatever monitoring data is relevant to them. Specific dashboards can be designed and assigned for specific users. In the words of our CEO and Chief of Product Ivo Mägi, “Our customers have requested for a better overview of the service portfolio they’re managing and increased agility in exposing relevant metrics from us over the last year. We listened, learned, and are now glad to present the response from our product team. This new dashboard will allow our users to get an overview of the APIs and applications they have pinned to their dashboard within seconds. In addition, we are adding flexibility so you can alter the metrics relevant to your team and/or for particular services. Check it out yourself and join the rank of the customers enjoying improved overviews of their service portfolios”.

The Rollout Plan

The New Dashboard will be rolled out as follows – 

1. Those who sign up for a trial will have this Dashboard enabled by default. 
2. For existing Plumbr SaaS Customers 
   1. Those who are only using our default filters will be migrated first. This migration will be automatic, and will not affect any reporting. 
   2. Those who are using custom filters will be contacted first, and based on their filters, we will help to create and configure their dashboards as part of the migration. 
3. For existing Plumbr On-prem customers, we will reach out and conduct a demo of the new features. After the demo, we will migrate the on-prem servers to reflect the new dashboard. 

Future Updates

Our innovation for presenting data that is being monitored does not end here. We’re constantly trying to refine the product experience from Plumbr users. In upcoming iterations, we will be releasing the ability to customize metrics that are visible on the cards. You can choose from a large array of metrics that are being collected, both from the availability and performance side. We will also be releasing the ability to add and maintain user profiles, where team members you bring to Plumbr will only be able to do a restricted set of operations on the data. 

We understand that these changes can be a handful! Which is why we’re having a dedicated support track to help ensure a smooth transition for your teams. Please email support@plumbr.io with the subject line as New Dashboard Migration and remember to include all your questions. You can also arrange for a callback from them if need be. 

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