BMC Helix Dashboards overview
BMC Helix Dashboards offers unified reporting and gives you a consolidated view of data from applications across your environment. The consolidated view of dashboards helps you perform tasks such as responding to issues quickly so that system downtime is minimized. You can create, export, and share interactive and customizable dashboards with users within or outside your environment. You can also improve the efficiency of your system by monitoring the key performance metrics.
BMC Helix Dashboards is a part of the BMC Helix solution. Built on a microservices-based architecture, it is available both as a SaaS service and a container-based on-premises deployment. You access BMC Helix Dashboards from BMC Helix Portal, which is the launchpad to your licensed BMC Helix services.
You can view data from the following products:
The following video (4.30) provides a high-level introduction to the product and explains its key capabilities.
BMC Helix Dashboards and Grafana version information
The following table lists the BMC Helix Dashboards versions and the corresponding Grafana versions:
BMC Helix Dashboards version | Grafana version |
|---|---|
| 9.5.3 |
| 9.5.1 |
| 9.3.0 |
| 9.2.2 |
| 9.0.2 |
| 8.4.5 |
| 8.3.3 |
| 8.2.5 |
BMC Helix Dashboards key capabilities
Capability | Description | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| Collect data from various BMC Helix solutions and provides a consolidated view in the form of interactive dashboards. | |
| Use out-of-the-box dashboards to quickly visualize and analyze data in your environment. | |
Configure dashboards | Configure dashboards, panels, and queries to gain insight into your data. You can also configure a time range for the data and explore a query to troubleshoot it. | |
| Use dashboard variables as placeholders for values that can be used in queries and panel titles. By using variables, you can filter the dashboard's data to reflect the desired value. | |
| Schedule automatic distribution of dashboard reports through email or FTP server on specific days of the week, month, or a year. A tenant administrator can access the report from email or the FTP server according to the schedule to analyze the data. | |
| Automate dashboard queries by creating calculated fields. By using the calculated fields, you can avoid writing manual queries for your dashboards. | |
Restrict dashboard permissions | Restrict viewing, and access to a dashboard in your environment. |
Navigating dashboards
The following annotated image explains the operations that are common across all dashboards:
- Folder name
- Dashboard name
- Select this icon to mark a dashboard as favorite. If you mark it as a favorite, the dashboard is available in a list on your home page for quick access.
- Share or export a dashboard. For more information, see Sharing-and-embedding-dashboards.
- Click to add a panel in a dashboard. For more information, see Configuring-dashboards-panels-and-queries.
- Click to save your changes in a dashboard.
- Click to configure the common settings for a dashboard.
- Click to view a dashboard in the kiosk mode. In the kiosk mode, you can view the dashboard in full screen. Press the ESC key to come out of the kiosk mode.
- Click the arrow to change the time range for a dashboard. Select an absolute time range or a relative time range. In the absolute time range, you can add the start and end dates. In the relative time range, you can select a relative duration, for example, last 7 days or last 15 minutes.
- Click to zoom out the Time range box. Press CTRL+Z to undo the zoom.
- Click to refresh a dashboard and fetch the latest data.
Click the arrow next to this icon to specify the duration after which the dashboard is automatically refreshed. For example, every 5 seconds (s), every 2 hours (h), or every day (d).