v12.1 Dashboard

[sky-knight]

I have to admit, when v12 added a dashboard I was a bit upset. The features it brought to the table were a bucket of shiny lights on a product that I feel needs a ton of attention to other critical features and I felt that at this time the functionality was a huge waste of time, ultimately costing sales.

But now that I see it on v12.1, it's become one of those things that's so well polished it's hard to imagine what Untangle was like before it. The default collection of widgets is a very quickly way to get an idea of what's going on with a network, and my business owners are enjoying watching it. They don't really understand what they're seeing, but they LIKE it. Which is always a good thing.

So I'm sorry for being my usual short sighted self, and great job Untangle for a nice new update for the UI. A double thank you for making your servers easy to manage via smart phone, all of these UI improvements are very welcome value adds to the platform.

I still need central management though... at least a single pane of glass to get at all the Untangles... It's really hard to manage numbers of untangle servers!

[dmorris]

Thanks sky-knight.

I'm right there with you.
It took me a long time to get used to the new navigation and dashboard, but I can't do without now.
I'm sure the next set of changes will be the same. We still don't fully support phones and tables so there are more changes coming.

I leave my dashboard up pretty much 24/7 on my home network just so I can see whats going on.
I freaking love it. I just like to know how much bandwidth skype/bittorrent/streaming/whatever is using at any moment and who is doing what.

Its definitely not meant to be eye candy. There are many in the space that basically have very pretty but completely static or non-configurable (and non-responsive) dashboards. Those are eye candy.
This is meant to be basically a showcase for our reporting engine so you can see at a glance stuff you care about.

[johnsonx42]

Agreed with everything you both said... the v12 dashboard was cool and all, but I didn't have a lot of use for it; seems like it made things slower too and navigation was a little awkward. Finally just this morning I got one of my main untangle boxes to upgrade to v12.1, and I'm sitting here marveling at it. The new dashboard is super-fun (I mean that in an IT guy way), and the whole UI seems snappier. The realtime geo-location stuff is also super-fun. Well done!

[sky-knight]

So the Dashboard just gave me insight on a very interesting problem last night.

At 4pm, one of my Untangle servers simply "stopped". I say stopped but, that's not the whole story. I'm at my office, I can RDP to the server beyond said Untangle. I can SSH to said Untangle. I can remote admin to said Untangle. By all visible definition, this thing is online. Yet, the dashboard told the tale. The Network Interface usage graph, a wonderful hour long snapshot of activity read like a heart monitor in a movie. Beep, beep... flatline...

I spent an hour trying to figure out what was going on as I mentioned I had full remote control of said network. Untangle could ping whatever it wanted inside and outside of the network. I could ping Untangle from my office. But none of the devices within the network could ping anything beyond Untangle's external IP addresses.

Now again... remember... I'm doing all of this troubleshooting REMOTELY. It's quite surreal when you're asking a server to ping the IP address you're connecting from to get RDP going to begin with and watching it fail. If the server couldn't ping my office how was I RDP'd into the thing?

I thought the NAT engine / firewall in Untangle had lost its mind. Reboot Untangle... no joy. Stop the UVM... no joy. Drove over there in frustration ready to lobotomize Untangle, reinstall, reconfigure, and move on.

When I walked in the door that little voice in my head said, you need to get into the media room. For this job site that's where the cable modem is, it's also the home of a little 8 port gigabit switch that boosts the signal through the 350ft cat5 that ends up at Untangle. I power cycled said switch, and watched on on my phone as that network activity graph sprung to life.

I still for the life of me cannot imagine what insanity was going on in that Netgear to create this situation, but having that darned dashboard was nice because I knew it was back, at a glance.

[dmorris]

I had a similar incident a few weeks back on my home network.I couldn't ping stuff and ARP wasn't working. I couldn't ping Untangle from my machines and it couldn't ping my machines.I reset my netgear gigabit switch and it all came back. I've never had to do that.