Request for feedback - UI dashboard

First, I would like to thank you for a great product. I agree with the above folks, a status of connected clients by group would be No. 1.

The rest would be nice to help with problem clients…

Average time to complete and verify successful updates. We have devices that turn off at night. It would be nice to know the latest time we can update based on the average update time.

No. of retry attempts for updates if greater than one. – Again show’s problem locations as we are geographically spread. Showing if there are issue in smaller community where bandwidth is limited.

No. of successful updates for the month by group.

Bandwidth usage especially during updating.

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@gil0109 Thanks! That’s very helpful.

We’re about to add a basic feature on the dashboard that alerts you when clients haven’t pinged in 24 hrs - we will iterate over this and make the length of time customizable too.

Some of other features you suggest sound super interesting, and might mesh well with an idea for per-device update history that we have in mind.

(On a side note, if bandwidth usage is an issue for you then Update Modules might be interesting to you!)

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hi,
i am not aware of an option in the dashboard to do an deployment at a certain time or at least did not find it, but this would be nice to lets say for example 01:00 am push some deployments to devices.
is this possible at all? with or without the dasboard?
anyway this would be a nice option to have :slight_smile:
greets

They way you would implement something like this today is on the client utilizing state-scripts which allow you control the update flow, here you can say, only start downloading the artifact if it is after 01:00, or you can download it but do not reboot until time is 01:00 and so on.

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I personally would like the ability to group devices (for both monitoring and releases) by one of Inventory fields, and make these groups dynamic (as inventory is). I understand it is possible by using API but having this out-of-the box would be cool!

And a couple of comments regarding today’s UI:

  • Deployments view shows deployments of the last day by default and no quick way to show all deployments.
  • impossible to create a deployment for a number if individual devices

As for proposition for dashboard, It would be nice to have a system overview where you can see the percentage of all software verions deployed in your system

Firstly, I want to thank you for a great upgrade in v2. I am currently running it in OpenShift (that was fun to get working) and so far things are working great.

Suggestions for UI now that I am using the new GUI for a month or so:

Display version of Mender
Ability to see offline by Group
Ability to see only offline devices by clicking warning
In Device area, it would be nice to sort by columns displayed (especially Last Checked in)
In Device area, Ability to search for a specific device by various methods mac/location/etc…

I haven’t done a large push of an image update yet but that’s coming…

Hi @ster and @gil0109,

Thanks a lot for your feedback, this helps make Mender better for everyone!

Here are some comments:

  • Showing all deployments. This used to be the default, but due to scale issues of loading everything by default we switched to last day default (it got slow for some larger installations with 10s-100s of deployments each day). But maybe last week would be a more reasonable default? @michaelatmender?

  • Create deployment for several individual devices. This is what groups are for. Or did you not want to create a group for these devices – are there any issues you see with this?

  • Overview of software version distribution. This is on the roadmap and planned as a commercial feature (Hosted Mender / Mender Enterprise).

  • Display version of Mender. This is an inventory attribute and should be available by default. Can you click on a device under Devices and see if you see the field “mender_client_version”?

  • Offline by group. Good point, will consider for new feature (fits together with software distribution).

  • See offline devices. Same as above, I think this is part of the same feature (not very useful to see how many devices are offline if you cannot see which ones).

  • Sort by columns. On the roadmap for all editions.

  • Search for specific device. Filtering by inventory attributes is already available in commercial editions of Mender (Hosted Mender / Mender Enterprise).

Overall the goal for commercial editions (Hosted Mender / Mender Enterprise) is to support larger-scale environments and higher levels of security. The open source edition will have the important features and will of course continue to be improved as well!

Thanks again for the feedback, and please let us know if you have more.

The Mender server version is not available via the API, nor the UI.

Hi @SuicidalLabRat,
The Mender server version should be on the bottom left in the UI (at all times), I believe it was introduced in Mender 1.6. Can you not see it?

Sadly, no. We are running 1.7.1; see attached.

That is strange! I just brought up an 1.7.1 server following the docs and it does state the version – see attached.
Are you sure you’re running 1.7.1 and all the services?

Perhaps @michaelatmender would know in which cases this is not displayed?Screenshot%20from%202019-08-06%2010-42-24

It could be that the ‘version’ environment variable isn’t available to the UI for some reason, but I’m not sure why that would happen. The entrypoint.sh file gets the version from the integration service and inserts it into the UI code. Maybe check if your docker-compose or demo script have been changed and check that there is a reference to INTEGRATION_VERSION?

It doesn’t look like the version is exposed in the production environment script, only in the demo environment. So it will not currently be seen in production environments.

This is a bug, I have created https://tracker.mender.io/browse/MEN-2690.

Quick FYI
We have upgraded to 2.0.1 and this issue persists. i.e. no version number displayed in the UI.

The ticket specifically says that the fix was released after 2.0.1.
2.0.2 is unlikely to ever be released, but 2.1.0 is upcoming very
shortly, and should have the fix.

Hello everyone,

i think having an alias column for mender clients would also be a nice feature, after using mender for a while now, i sometimes had trouble identifying the right clients, having only mac & ID to my disposal.
Having an alias that u can set yourself would be a nice edition to gui.


blurred some confident data

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Thanks @genedupre, good feedback. We are working towards adding custom attributes for devices, which might be something useful for the feature you propose. Would it be something you’d want to set for devices individually in the UI, after they’ve connected?

You might be aware of this feature already - but you can currently set device identity attributes, if you wanted to have more available to you than only mac & ID. You would have to do this up front though, before connecting devices: https://docs.mender.io/2.3/client-configuration/identity

@michaelatmender thanks for the reply,

yes that would be great, in our case, also non-IT people come in contact with mender-dashboard, been able to just ‘click and give it a name’ would be great benefit

My 2 cents after using hosted Mender interface for about 2 months now.

+1 for sorting by columns! It’s definitely not ideal seeing serial numbers, etc. out of order when trying to drill down to inventory data of a particular device. It’d also be nice to select which columns to add or remove from the device table display for a quick comparison of inventory values (although the new device filtering features will help with this somewhat).

I can see a use case for quickly issuing a deployment to a few select devices without having to mess with moving around group associations if the grouping will be temporary. I’d say it’s a minor inconvenience at best to use groups for this purpose.

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