Introducing Dashboard/Instrument Templates

We just shipped what we feel is going to be a powerful new feature in your Metrics toolbox. Up until now when creating instruments you've always had to explicitly specify one or more sources for each stream. When monitoring multiple instances of the same thing (e.g servers, clusters, sensors, etc) that meant you would have repeatedly define the same instruments/dashboards for each instance. While you could use our API to automate this creation, there hasn't been a good way to apply a single, curated set of instruments/dashboards across homogenous sources.

That changes today with the introduction of instrument/dashboard templates! Templates permit you to leave the source unspecified, and later dynamically toggle the source being visualized. To create an instrument template, simply add a stream to an instrument and use the percent sign (%) as the source. While inspecting an instrument template, a form on the left enables you to toggle between different sources, including wildcards. Try it out!

Now that you can construct instrument templates, once you add them to a dashboard an input field next to the date-picker enables you to dynamically toggle all the templates in said dashboard to the source of your choosing:

Much like our date-range query parameter support, we use HTML5's replaceState support to dynamically update the source query parameter in your address bar as you toggle a template between different sources. You can bookmark or copy/paste the URI with the source query parameter set and the instrument/dashboard template will load with that source the next time you go to that URI:

We expect this to significantly improve your experience while monitoring larger scale infrastructure, and as always any feedback you might have is invaluable. Enjoy!