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Feature overview

Important: The documentation in this topic refers to a feature or product that is currently in Early Availability status. Features in Early Availability status are only available in production to a limited number of customers based on fit with specific use cases. For more information about Early Availability status, see Product lifecycle phases. If you would like to use the product capabilities described here during the Early Availability phase, contact your AppDirect technical representative.

After you have successfully connected your data sources and organized your widgets, another question emerges: what features will you use to drive interaction with your AppInsights dashboards? We offer a variety of complimentary features that facilitate dashboard viewing, sharing, and customization—it’s up to you which ones you’d like to leverage.

Below is a quick recap of these features, along with direct links to their individual tutorials.

Basic styling

For simple stylistic dashboard modifications like changing your background or adding your company logo, navigate to our Basic Styling menu (found in the main Settings menu -> Gear Icon, top right).

For more information, see the following topic:

Advanced styling

For advanced stylistic changes like font, widget background color, borders, and so on, navigate to our Advanced Styling menu (requires use of CSS stylesheet language).

For more information, see the following topic:

If you are interested in sharing a live dashboard with a colleague or customer without offering editing privileges, you will want to use our share link feature. Share links are also ideal for representing a dashboard permanently in a company lobby, conference room, or call center as they simply require an active browser tab for proper representation.

You can create share-links for individual dashboards—each with a unique URL—or create a dashboard folder with a corresponding share link that will cycle through each live dashboard at a specified interval.

For more information, see the following topic:

IP whitelisting

IP whitelisting can be used as a security precaution to ensure that only users attempting to access your AppInsights dashboard(s) from a specific IP (or set of IPs) can gain access. From the “IP Whitelisting” menu you can add multiple IP Addresses and give them unique descriptions for reference purposes.

For more information, see the following topic:

User management

Depending on the number of additional users that can be added to your account, you can invite a number of your colleagues to access your AppInsights account. When adding new users, you will be required to apply one of the following permission levels:

  • Owner—same editing privileges as primary account admin
  • View and edit —full editing privileges but unable to invite additional users
  • View Only—no editing or invitation privileges

For “view and edit” or “view only” users, an added level of security allows you to limit access to specific dashboards, or even specific authentications.

For more information, see the following topic:

Data export

If you are interested in interacting with your AppInsights widget data using other tools, you can export data to a CSV spreadsheet. Please note that the export history will vary depending on the widget in question. A standard number widget might only provide a single data point, while a line graph that has been populated over many months will be represented by a larger data-set within your exported spreadsheet.

The specifics of each visualization’s “data memory” can be found in our Widgets: Technical specifications support document.

For users that are interested in exporting data dynamically using our custom API, please refer to the API documentation for comprehensive instructions.

Alerts

Setting up alerts for your widgets ensures that you are immediately notified when a goal is reached, or a KPI falls below an acceptable threshold. To begin setting up widget alerts, start by navigating to the primary AppInsights settings icon and selecting the “Alerts” menu. Using the data stream identifier for your widget(s), you can set unique alert(s) based on a goal or threshold for your KPI. There is no limit to the number of alerts you can set or the number of recipients for the notification.

For more information, see the following topic:

Scheduled reports

Our scheduled reports feature allows you to send an email with an attached image of your dashboard. You can send a one-time email, or you can automate a scheduled email that will send every week (or multiple times a week) at a day / time that you specify. To get started, open the share menu at the top right of your AppInsights dashboard.

For more information, see the following topics:

Collaboration

Once multiple users have access to your AppInsights dashboards, it’s only a matter of time before questions and commentary around your KPIs begin to emerge. Our “Collaboration” feature was created with this in mind, and empowers users to initiate dialogue within AppInsights by adding comments to specific widgets. These comments can be made by, and are visible to, all users on your account with ownership and view and edit privileges. All comment history is also saved so you can catch up on recent AppInsights conversations you might have missed.

For more information, see the following topic:

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