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The console at a glance

This chapter is a short tour of the parts of the console you see on every page: the home page, the sidebar, the page header with its tenant chip, and the message you get when part of the console is not available on your installation.

It is for anyone new to the console. Read it once, and the later chapters will make more sense.

The home page​

After you sign in, you land on the home page. It welcomes you by name and shows two counts: how many Devices and how many Device Types your tenant has. Select either count to open that list.

The console home page. The sidebar is on the left. The header reads Dashboard, with the tenant chip 'acme (sim)' at the top right. The page is titled 'Welcome, Dana Okafor' and shows two cards: 13 Devices and 1 Device Types.

The Dashboard entry at the top of the sidebar always brings you back here. It is not the same as Dashboards, which holds the dashboards your team builds.

The sidebar​

The sidebar on the left is how you move around the console. It lists the areas of your tenant in a fixed order.

The console sidebar. Under the DeviceChain logo and the words Management Console it lists Dashboard, Dashboards, Alarms, Connectors, Devices, Assets, Customers, Areas, Facets, Browse, Audit, Updates and Settings. Devices, Assets, Customers, Areas, Updates and Settings have an arrow showing they open a sub-menu. The signed-in user's name and email are at the bottom.

Some entries open a sub-menu instead of a page. Selecting one opens its sub-menu and takes you to its first page. Only one sub-menu is open at a time.

EntryWhat it holds
DashboardThe home page.
DashboardsDashboards built by your team.
AlarmsThe alarms your rules have raised.
ConnectorsOutbound connections to other systems.
DevicesDevices, Device Types, Device Profiles, Device Groups, Maintenance Windows and Command Batches.
AssetsAssets, Asset Types and Asset Groups.
CustomersCustomers, Customer Types and Customer Groups.
AreasAreas, Area Types, Area Groups and Geofences.
FacetsThe keys you use to describe and filter devices and other entities.
BrowseA query builder for finding entities by their facets.
AuditThe tenant's record of who changed what.
UpdatesArtifacts and Signers for over-the-air updates.
SettingsBranding, Map and Language.

You see only the entries your role allows. If your role cannot read alarms, for example, Alarms is not in your sidebar. Updates appears only when your installation runs the update service. The Settings entries are for tenant administrators.

Your name and email address sit at the bottom of the sidebar. They open the user menu, which is described in Signing in.

To make more room for the page, use the button at the left of the page header to collapse the sidebar to a narrow strip of icons. Use it again to expand it.

The page header and the tenant chip​

Every page has a header bar. On the left is the name of the section you are in. On a detail page, such as one device, a link on the right takes you back to the list.

At the far right is the tenant chip. It shows which tenant you are working in: the tenant's name, with its token underneath.

The tenant chip: a small card with a building icon, the tenant name 'acme (sim)' and, below it, the token 'sim-acme' in a monospace font.

If your tenant has uploaded a logo, the chip shows the logo in place of the building icon. Everything you see and change in the console belongs to this tenant. To work in a different tenant, sign out and choose it when you sign in again.

When an area is unavailable​

DeviceChain is made of several services, and whoever installs it decides which ones to run. Some are optional, such as the AI service or the outbound connectors service. If a page needs a service your installation does not run, the page shows Not deployed instead of its usual content.

The AI Providers page of the admin console showing an empty state titled 'Not deployed'. The text explains that the instance was deployed without the ai-inference service, so the feature is unavailable, that nothing is wrong with the session, and that an administrator chooses which services an instance runs.

The message names the missing service. Nothing is wrong with your session or your account. If you need the feature, ask your administrator, using the service name from the message.

The screenshot shows an instance-administration page, but tenant pages behave the same way. For example, Connectors shows this message when the outbound connectors service is not running.