Legacy Dashboards: Enable Dashboard Rotation for a NOC Display

Legacy Dashboard System

Statseeker v5.5.0 introduced a new dashboarding system. The legacy system was removed from new installations, but is still available to users upgrading an existing Statseeker server. This documentation is specific to that legacy system.

For documentation relating to the current dashboarding system see Statseeker Dashboards.

Index

Overview
User Accounts and Permissions
- Create a User
- Grant Access to all Groups and Reports
Assign Dashboards to the User
Setup the NOC Dashboard Display

Overview

The Statseeker Dashboard is the default view when accessing Statseeker via the web interface.

The dashboard is both user and group aware, meaning that you can restrict access to a dashboard as well as tailor a dashboard to a given user (or group of users). Dashboards and users have a many-to-many relationship in Statseeker, meaning that:

A dashboard can be accessed by one or more users
A user can access one or more dashboards

In this way, you can tailor any number of dashboards to offer:

A high-level overview of the entire network
A view covering all devices of a specific type or in a specific location
A focused snapshot of a group of interfaces
A view into your hardware inventory and licensing requirements

You can also configure Statseeker to rotate the dashboard view through all of the enabled dashboards for the current user. This is very useful for display on a network operations center (NOC) panel.

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User Accounts and Permissions

When rotating dashboards, Statseeker will use every dashboard currently enabled for the user. For this reason, you may not want to use the default admin account, rather create a specific account for this purpose and associate only those dashboards that you want displayed on the NOC with that new user.

In order for the dashboards to display all the data, you will need to ensure that the user is assigned all the group permissions required to access all the devices that will be reported on, as well as all of the reports that will be displayed on the dashboards.

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To create a new Statseeker user account:

Select Administration Tool > User Profile/Grouping > Add / Edit Users

This will open the Add / Edit Users page with the Administration Tool.

Enter a username into the text field and click Add

The New User Configuration screen is displayed.

Specify an email address for the account
Optionally allow the same account credentials to provide access to the Statseeker RESTful API
Specify an authentication method:
- File - authenticated directly with the Statseeker server
- LDAP - use your existing Active Directory/LDAP authentication to manage access to Statseeker
- RADIUS - use your existing RADIUS server to manage access to Statseeker
Note: the Authentication Method field is only visible if Statseeker has been configured to use either LDAP or RADIUS authentication, otherwise all accounts are considered to be using basic file authentication and the field is hidden. For more information see User Authentication.
If the account is configured to use File authentication, then the Password field will be displayed, enter a password for the account
Set the required time zone for the account, this will be used when displaying reports to the user within Statseeker
Click Add User

The user account has been saved, and can be used immediately.

For more details on creating user accounts, see User Accounts.

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Grant Access to all Groups and Reports

To grant the NOC user account access to all reports, groups and devices we will create a group to house everything and then assign the NOC user access to that group:

Select Administration Tool > User Profile/Grouping > Add / Edit Groups
Enter a name for the new group and click Add

Next, populate the group:

Select Administration Tool > User Profile/Grouping > Entities to a Group
Select your new group
In the right-hand panel, set Entity Type to Report
Click All >> to move all reports from the exclude list to the include list

The group now contains all current reports.

Select Administration Tool > User Profile/Grouping > Groups to an Entity
Set the entity type to User, and select the NOC user
Select All Groups and click the >> button to move the selection to the include list

The NOC user now has access to all currently monitored devices and all reports.

For more details on associating devices, groups and reports with user accounts, see Grouping Devices, Interfaces, Users and Reports.

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Copy Dashboards to the NOC User

If you have already created dashboards, then you can log into Statseeker as an Admin user, and assign those dashboards to the NOC user account by following the process presented below.

Any new dashboards created while logged in as the NOC user are automatically available to that user.

Go to Administration Tool > Reporting / Scheduling > Dashboards
Select the Dashboard Copy Utility
Select the dashboards to be copied, multiple selections can be used using the shift and ctrl keys while making the selection
Select the NOC user and click Copy

The copy process is simulated and a summary of the results is displayed.
- An error will be displayed if a user does not have access to a report or group featured in the dashboard
- A warning will be displayed if a user does not have access to a report or group referenced in a drill-down from a report featured in the dashboard
Review the summary, address any warnings/errors and click Copy to confirm the action