Introducing the Dashboard (alpha)

Hey, all!

Today, we’re excited to launch an alpha version of the Dashboard, a brand new feature that simplifies and improves the Spark development experience! Our team has been daydreaming and planning this dashboard for months, and we’re super stoked to share it with our favorite people: you, the community!

What is the Dashboard?

Think of the Dashboard as your central hub. It gives you visibility into what’s happening on your devices, both while you’re developing and once your Spark-powered project is being used in the real world.

Specifically, it is the place for:

  • Event logging (available now)
  • Error tracking (coming soon)
  • Rich visualizations from device data (coming soon)
  • Interacting with and controlling your Spark devices (coming soon)

This is also the start of a whole bunch of tools that will give those of you fine folks creating products the ability to manage and learn from your fleet of devices (pushing out firmware en masse, monitoring the health of your systems, and more). More details on this are coming soon!

Event Logging

Today, we’re excited to roll out Event Logging as part of the alpha. Many of you already use Spark’s publish/subscribe feature to efficiently pass data between the cloud and your devices. Up until now, the only ways to see events being sent to and from your device were either to fire up the command line and run spark subscribe, or hit an API endpoint. Useful, but it ain’t pretty.

The Dashboard provides a clean interface to view event information in real-time, scoped for your devices. We’re hoping that this is handy both while debugging code during development, and checking out recent activity on your device once you power-on your finished project. Here’s a snapshot of a Spark device monitoring the health of a theoretical aquarium:

The top section of the page is a visualization of the number of events from your devices over time. Each color in the bar graph represents a unique event. Here’s a closeup:

Below is a real-time log of events passing through the cloud. You’ll get the name, timestamp, device name, and data associated with the event. Oh yea! And, if you click, you can see a raw JSON view of the event if you’re nerdy or whatever.

How Do I Get Started?

To check out the Dashboard alpha, head over to https://dashboard.spark.io and login with your Spark account.

When you first log in, your Dashboard might look a little lonely. That’s ok! Fill it up with published events.

To take full advantage of the event logging feature right now, you’ll need to have a Spark device online, that is actively publishing events to the Spark cloud. Specifically, this means calling Spark.publish() in your firmware.

We’d love to hear what you think of the Dashboard so far. Please post any feedback in this here thread! That being said, a couple of things to keep in mind:

  • This is not a finished product, and there will likely be bugs found. We wanted to focus on shipping you all something quickly to begin iterating based on feedback and usage. We don’t expect this to be production-ready, and neither should you! There are numerous additional features and elements coming - this is just a start :slight_smile:
  • Currently, this view is just events in real-time. It doesn’t yet show historical events sent before this window was open.
  • We’ll be rolling out historical events very soon.
  • We so appreciate your feedback, thoughts and ideas. Please keep them coming! We’re building this for all of you, and will incorporate your feedback into future versions of the dashboard.

Thanks for being awesome! We’re seriously stoked to see how y’all like it!

P.S. @jtzemp and I will be doing an AMA here on community.spark.io this Thursday, April 9 from 12PM-4PM PDT, where you can ask us anything your heart desires!

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Congrats! I will definitely be a frequent user of the dashboard!
This is UBER COOL!

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My god… this is fantastic! Thank you guys. You will be taking lots of work away from people, specially those who are just starting or those who want a quick glance at all the data they are receiving.

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@Iv4n and @marcus so glad you’re excited about it! Let us know how you’re using the tool, and if you see any ways that it can improve

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Great!, we have been waiting for this.

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This is super helpful.
I’m loving the “device came online” indicator, and also I can see at a glance that my events are triggering webhooks.
Great job, guys.

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@jeiden, I noticed that if the webhook response is long enough, the response text covers up the timestamp on the RHS of the line. :stuck_out_tongue:

@peekay123 Awesome! That’s exactly the kind of feedback that is super helpful! I will add that to our list of fixes, thank you.

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Great!!!

Hey guys!

Thanks for all of your excitement and thoughtful feedback so far. Based on what we’ve heard from you, we’ve made the following bug fixes to the Dashboard, deployed today:

  • The event stream will now be open forever, with no timeouts
  • The tickers on the right and left of the event graph no longer have fractional values, they will always be integers (after all, you can’t publish 1/2 of an event :stuck_out_tongue: )
  • Events published from non-devices (Spark JS, CLI) will now appear with a name of cloud, not 001
  • Long event names and data objects will no longer spill over into the next column, they are neatly cut off with ellipses. Expanding the event will give you the entire event object for these cases

We are so grateful for all of your help and enthusiasm trying out the Dashboard, and keep the feedback coming! New features will be rolled out periodically, so stay tuned for updates!

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This is soooo cool! Thanks guys!

@jeiden, one thing missing from the dashboard is the webhook “output” to the target site so we can see if the webhook syntax is as expected. I consider this a major debugging aid for webhooks :stuck_out_tongue:

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@peekay123 Nice call, so I assume you’d want to see the exact JSON that is being posted to the webhook URL in the data attribute of the event?

@jeiden, what I’m looking for is the resulting http output of the webhook which includes form, querry, etc. data. I want to know exactly what call the webhook generates. :smiley:

Is the Dashboard still up? It was working great of me until yesterday then stopped. My projects are still working fine, just no data in the events log

@bgeipel, that’s happened to me. Log out and then back in and you should see your data. I do believe a fix is planned. :smiley:

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I tried that a number of times. I will wait and see - not essential, just really cool :smile:

Well, the issue was in my code. I have no idea how it ever worked :slight_smile:

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Not sure if it’s planned or already mentioned, but I would very much like a filter option in the dashboard, so one could select specific devices or events to display/monitor, rather than having to scan through all devices/events

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