How To Build Harness Dashboards

Updated

In our previous post, we introduced Harness Dashboards, our new custom dashboarding solution that helps inform operations, identify bottlenecks, and drive business outcomes. We highlighted a few examples of out-of-the-box dashboards across various Harness modules, which have enabled teams across organizations to analyze and measure software delivery and eliminate guesswork. In this post, we will talk about how you can customize the dashboards to enable various stakeholders to be more focused and productive.

Overview

Dashboards enable you to build and add custom tiles with metrics that are most important and relevant to you. Tiles can query data and visualize from different Harness modules. You can add any number of tiles to a dashboard, move tiles around, and configure the layout to enhance the flow of data - and also add textual tiles for additional context and metadata.

Harness Dashboards have the capability to configure global dashboard-level filters to quickly switch context. Dashboards come packaged with advanced reporting functionality, which allows you to stay updated on the latest data. There are also alerting capabilities that can notify you when something doesn’t seem right.

User-Defined Dashboards

When building a dashboard, you can utilize Harness’ out-of-the-box dashboards as templates to quickly get started by cloning the dashboard and making incremental changes as per requirements. Alternatively, you can build a dashboard from scratch.

Custom user-defined dashboards enable transparency and data-driven decisionmaking. Providing an easy and impactful way of visualizing actionable insights and channeling feedback into the process, this flexibility empowers end users to create role-specific views rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. Creating custom views is a simple 3-step process:

Create
Configure
Collaborate

Creating a Dashboard

In Harness, navigate to Dashboards.
In Dashboards, click the + Dashboard button.
Choose the name, folder, and optionally, add Tags.

Configure a Dashboard

Once you create a dashboard, the next step is to add tiles and text to the dashboard. As you add tiles to a dashboard, they are automatically sized and placed at the bottom of the dashboard, but you can move and resize tiles to maintain a logical flow of data. You can also edit tiles after you’ve created them to adjust the names of the tiles, visualizations, or underlying queries.

Edit the dashboard.
Click Add Tile from the top left of the dashboard pane, and choose Visualization.
You will be presented with various data models (Explores) that Harness exposes across all modules: CI (Delivery and Test Metrics), CD and Feature Flags (Delivery Metrics), and CCM (Business Impact).
An Explore is a starting point for a query, designed to explore a particular subject area. Choose the Explore of interest and proceed.
Name the tile, select the fields to visualize, add filters to scope the data, choose from a wide range of visualization options, and hit run to immediately fetch results.
Save when happy!

A dashboard can contain data from different data models (CI, CD, FF, and CCM). Harness enables a single pane of glass for visibility into the entire software delivery lifecycle in a single dashboard.

A finished dashboard could look like this:

Harness Dashboards: Example of a Completed Dashboard

Collaborate on a Dashboard

A dashboard can be exported into PDF and Excel formats to share and process in other systems. They also come with:

Advanced reporting: Schedule immediate or recurring delivery of dashboards.
Proactive alerting: Trigger notifications when specific conditions are met or exceeded.

Custom dashboards are not limited by the list of first class fields that are exposed - they support a wide range of custom functions. The first class fields, along with these functions, can be used to create custom dimensions for specific use cases, empowering users with tons of flexibility.