User guide
This guide walks through the DeviceChain web console, screen by screen, in the order the console's own navigation presents them. Each chapter explains what a screen is for, when you would use it, and what to expect, and is illustrated with screenshots of the console as shipped.
This is the guide for working in the console. For tasks done through the API or on the device side, such as connecting a device or sending a command from code, see the Guides.
The guide is written for two audiences:
- Tenant users and administrators, who work with the devices, rules, alarms and dashboards of one tenant. Most chapters are for you.
- Instance operators, who administer the whole installation: tenants, tiers, identities and identity providers. Those screens are gathered in their own chapter.
New to DeviceChain? Start with Your First Device to get data flowing, then come back here to learn the console. For how the pieces fit together, see the Concepts section.
Chapters
Chapters are published as they are completed.
| # | Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Signing in | The sign-in steps, single sign-on, choosing a tenant, an expired session, and the user menu (theme, language, profile). |
| 2 | The console at a glance | The home page, the sidebar, the tenant chip, and what you see when an area is unavailable. |
| 3 | Dashboards | Templates and import, viewing, editing on the canvas, widgets and bindings, export, and version history. |
| 4 | Viewing dashboards in /dash | The standalone dashboard viewer: signing in, loading a dashboard by token, kiosk mode for wall displays, and staying signed in. |
| 5 | Alarms | The live alarm list, filters, acknowledging and clearing, and exporting the list as CSV. |
| 6 | Notification policies | The policy list, and giving a policy quiet hours: time zone, weekly slots and a bypass severity. |
| 7 | Devices | Listing, creating and bulk-creating devices, importing devices from a CSV file, and exporting the list as CSV; disabling and enabling a device; the device detail tabs, including assignment, connectivity and location, events, commands, configuration (with restoring an earlier revision or copying another device's), credentials and replacement. |
| 8 | Device types and profiles | Device types and versioned device profiles: metrics, commands, configuration, publishing or rolling back a version, and downloading a version as a Thing Model. |
| 9 | Calculated metrics | Metrics computed from a formula on a device profile: authoring one, the formula language, what happens when a formula produces no value, backfilling history, and turning the feature on. |
| 10 | Detection rules | Authoring rules as a form, on the canvas, or in plain language; replay preview; rule health and the live feed. |
| 11 | Commanding a fleet | Command batches: creating one, following its progress, refusals and cancellation. |
| 12 | Updates (over the air) | Artifacts: uploading an update image, its trust and signatures, and retiring it; registering and revoking signers; and the device Updates tab: assigning, cancelling and abandoning an update, and what a disabled device means for updates. |
| 13 | Provisioning and trust anchors | Provisioning profiles for fleets that register themselves, expecting a device, trust anchors, certificate credentials and certificate profiles, and what works today with certificates. |
| 14 | Inbound integrations | Receiving device data from ChirpStack, The Things Stack or a generic HTTP sender: creating an integration, connecting the sender, device aliases, unregistered devices and traffic. |
| 15 | Connectors | Outbound connectors: creating, configuring and versioning them. |
| 16 | Assets, customers and areas | The registry families: lists, hierarchy, property schemas and members. |
| 17 | Geofences | Drawing and editing fences, and their history. |
| 18 | Groups, facets and Browse | Facet keys, the Browse query builder, and saving a result as a dynamic group. |
| 19 | Members, roles and customer users | Inviting members and changing their access, the tenant's own roles, and logins limited to your customers: what they see, and sharing dashboards with them. |
| 20 | Service accounts | Machine identities for scripts and integrations: what an account can do, creating one, obtaining a token, rotating a secret, and disabling or deleting it. |
| 21 | Audit | The tenant audit journal, filters and export. |
| 22 | Tenant settings | Branding, map and language. |
| 23 | Administering the instance | Tenants, deletions, tiers, identities, roles, identity providers, AI providers, instance audit and settings. |