Managing channels

Channels are small, self-contained pieces of content that are displayed on various pages throughout BMC Discovery. For example, the “Infrastructure” page is composed of several channels, including the Infrastructure Summary channel and a channel displaying Virtualization and Partitioning General Reports. The Channels page enables you to edit existing channels and create new ones.

Dashboards, which are displayed on the home page, are made up of user-configurable sets of channels. You can see which dashboards are available by clicking the Available Dashboards icon in the dynamic toolbox on the Home page. To view a dashboard, select it from the displayed list.

To view the channels page

To view the Channels page, From the main menu, click the Administration icon. The Administration page displays. From the Model section, click Channels.The page shows a list of channels.

Name—Displays a channel name.
Description—Displays a description for the channel.
Content—Displays the summary of what the channel contains.
Actions—Displays actions to be performed on the channel:
- Preview—Click to view the content of the channel.
- Edit—Click to edit the channel definition. This is only shown for channels which can be edited. For example, you cannot edit a built in chart.
- Delete—Click to delete the channel definition. This is only shown for channels which you have created.

Adding a new channel

You can add the following types of channels using this page:

Report Channel—A channel containing a list of charts and reports. See To add a report channel.
Summary Channel—A channel containing node kind counts. See To add a summary channel.

To add a report channel

You can add a report channel that contains standard BMC Discovery reports. To do this:

From the Channels page, click Add Report Channel.
The Add Report Channel page is displayed:

The Add Report Channel page displays the following fields:
Select Apply to create the channel or Cancel to discard the changes and return to the channels page.

To add a summary channel

You can add a summary channel that shows node counts for selected node kinds. To do this:

From the Channels page, click Add Summary Channel.
The Add Summary Channel page displays the following fields:
Select Apply to create the channel or Cancel to discard the changes and return to the channels page.