Creating custom dashboards in Foglight for SQL Server

Hello, welcome to this video about creating custom dashboards using some of the custom views within Foglight. Let's get started. First thing we need to do is go to the action pane on the right and create dashboard. I tend to just use old data and then we can see what's available. And we can just drag and drop what we want. Give it a name. And you might want to have this on a screen on the wall. So let's [INAUDIBLE] automatically refreshing every 30 seconds. There's also areas here where we could deal with things like relevant roles for security and just making sure that the dashboard is only available to the relevant people. But I'll skip that for today. The other thing I want to do is add a background image. I think this adds an extra level of making the dashboard look a bit neater. I've already prepared something. If we just quickly look at my documents here, I prepared something in PowerPoint. And I'll just slip back and save that as a JPEG file. But as you can see, it's got a nice gradient background. You could put your company logo in there with a status. You can put menus in here so you can drill down from this dashboard to another dashboard. And we can put some icons. I've just put SQL-server icons in there. But some customers like to put a logo in for the application, perhaps it's an ERP system, or a warehousing system, or a CRM system. And they can put those logos in there. It just means that everything is fairly clear about what you're seeing the metrics relating to. I've even seen people take a picture of the computer room's blades so that people can see which particular servers we're dealing with. So I'm going to go to background image here. And there are some things already in here we can use like maps and whatnot, but I'm just going to upload this particular image. So I'll go to the documents, show all files, and there's my logo. OK? And a little bit of preparation is required here because of the size of this. You may to play around with it. Once we start dragging and dropping things across, you may need to go back and perhaps rework that slightly to make sure that the where you're going to put the views fit into where you want them to be in terms of where you've laid all your existing icons. Click OK. Then we're going to collect next. Important thing here. We can have one, two, or three columns. I don't find that particular useful when you want to locate things into a particular fixed position. So we're going to go for a fixed size. It's a little bit ambiguous. What we mean by fixed is that you can put them where you want them. So there's lots of capability to move these around using the edit layout once we finish. So always go for fixed. Click finish. And at this point, I tend to click cancel because I want to add lots of different views or metrics. And I can do that without using the wizard. So there's my dashboard. And then we can go over to data where we can start moving things across to the dashboard we've created. So we're going to look through the topology here, look at databases, SQL Server, instances. And we can see the instances that I've got available. And this is where we could start dragging and dropping things onto our dashboards. In some of the previous presentations or blogs that you've seen, what we've looked up previously, is dragging and dropping some of the actual metrics across. But what I want to show you here is some of the views are associated with this particular level in the topology. So when I drag and drop this particular instance across, I do select view. And this is where we can start looking through the list of available views that we have. If I just click the roll on for a second, you can go to things like operator. And you could just have a tile like that or components like that. Or what we tend to sometimes see is things like an alarm severity with a name. So you can see something like that will be quite useful. OK? What I'm going to do for this one is just going to put the APM component [INAUDIBLE]. So I click finish for the first one. So it's showing me that it's a SQL instance with the name. I can hover over for further details. And I can see any alarms that we have will propagate up into that particular icon to show me whether it's warning, critical, or fatal. OK? So again, for simplicity here, I'm next going to go for instance SQL 2. And I'm just going to use the previous selection so it saves me having to look through the shopping list. And I'll do this particular instance as well. Use previous selection. OK? So let's do something a little bit more ambitious here. So we're going to do that one again. And now I'm going to select a view because I wanted to show you some of the out of the box components that you would have already seen when looking through the database dashboard light top SQL. We can just have a little component that we could drop down there. Template that will show me the top SQL statements or the top SQL batches. But the ones I wanted to really show is by looking in here. We've got a summary. And we've got some prepackaged components. So there are lots of different bits here that you can find if you look through. But if you wanted just something on your dashboard to show you your [INAUDIBLE] overview, or storage overview, or availability overview, these are things that