Collaborate with Boards | Honeycomb

Collaborate with Boards

Boards are a place to pin and save useful queries and graphs you want to retain for later reuse and reference. Use Boards to extend your knowledge to the rest of your team, to distribute your brain to your colleagues or your future self.

You can pin queries (just the search) to List Boards and graphs to Visual Boards.

To access Boards you and your teammates have created, click the Boards icon in the left navigation: Boards icon

About List Boards 

List Boards are a light-weight way to save queries you know you are going to want to reuse as starting points when investigating or exploring. When you think “I am going to start from here again next time, I should bookmark this," save it to a List Board. List Boards allow you to collect useful queries and access them for reuse without loading any associated graphs.

To save a query without the graph, pin it to a List Board.

About Visual Boards 

Use Visual Boards when you want to return and see the current state of something you queried before. Visual Boards are similar to conventional dashboards; they re-run and get updated results when their Board page is loaded.

To save a query and its parameters (so it will run again and display new results), pin it to a Visual Board. You can set the display of a visual board query to show a graph, table, or both.

Visual Boards have a time picker that allows you to re-run all queries on the board over the same time range. To reset back to the original queries saved to the board, simply choose Original Board Queries from the time picker.

Creating and Editing Boards 

To create a Board:

Run a query from the Query builder, then click the Add to Board star at the top of the page and click New Board. Saving to a new Board Give your new Board a name and select a List or Visual Board type. Optionally, give your Board a description to help other folks find and use it. Saving to a new Board–description

You can also create a new Board from the Home page or the main Boards page; click the New Board button.

To pin a query to an existing Board:

Follow the first step above, but select from the list of Boards shown instead of clicking New Board.

Editing Boards 

You (and any team member you have added as a collaborator, for private boards) can edit the following things on your Boards:

  • Board name and description: from within the Board, hover over the name or description of the Board and click the pen icon.
  • Query captions: from within the Board, hover over the “Describe this Query” line underneath the query or graph and click the pen icon. If this has already been set, you can still change it.
  • Board permissions: Click the Settings cog icon on the right side to change between Private and Public.
  • Board Style (List or Visual): Click the Settings cog icon on the right side to change from one style of Board to another.
  • Queries on the Board: Visual board queries can be configured to show the result graph, table, or both. Change the query’s display by clicking the gear icon on its upper right corner.
  • Delete a Query: For list boards, click the ‘x’ icon on the query’s upper right corner. For visual boards, click the settings gear icon on the query’s upper right corner, then select ‘Remove Query’.
  • Order of queries/graphs: Hover over the top of the graph or query you want to move until the cursor becomes a four-directional arrow, then drag and drop it to the desired location.
  • Delete the Board: click the Settings cog button at the top right and click Delete Board.

Editing a Query on a Board 

From within the Board, click the query you want to edit, which will bring you to the Query Builder. There will be a banner at the top indicating which Board you came from.

If you change the query, you will see a text button appear in the banner prompting you to update the query on the Board, which will save changes in query title or graph settings to the Board.

Sharing Boards 

A Board you create is public by default. At creation time, you can choose to make a board Limited. If you create a Limited Board, you can share it with specific members of your team by adding Collaborators.

A Limited Board displays a lock next to its name, and is only visible to you and any Collaborators you invited and Team Owners.

To make a Limited Board public, click on the Settings icon at the top of the screen.

Note: A Team Owner can see all Boards owned by members of their team, Limited or not.

Adding Collaborators to a Board 

You can add one or all of your teammates as Collaborators to your Limited Boards.

You can add teammates individually, or all at once with single click.

Collaborators can add or remove queries or graphs, and edit the name and description of your Board. This means you can hand off an ongoing outage or incident to the next person on call and they can take it from there.

Filter Your Queries on Boards 

Board Filters allow you to apply one or more parameters to all queries on your board. When viewing a Board and its queries, use the Filter By search box to enter your parameter(s). Select Apply to apply the parameter(s) to all queries on your board.

For example, if you have a board called “Errors Overview”, which looks at all the errors occurring in your system, you may optionally want to apply a filter to look at errors occurring in the frontend service that you own. In this case, a filter by service.name=frontend applies that parameter on top of every existing query on the board to output service-specific results.

board_filters_overview

Save filter parameters on Boards 

Filter parameters can also be saved to a Board, so that any user who arrives to the Board in the future will see query results with the filter parameters applied.

To save parameters, first input your desired filter parameters and select Apply. Then, the Save Parameters button will appear as selectable. Select it to save those parameters as the board’s default filters.

board_filters_save_parameters

To override existing saved parameters, modify the filters, select Apply, and then select Save Parameters.

Filter States 

Filter parameters apply across all queries in a board. Since a Board can contain queries on different datasets, applying filter parameters can result in three possible states denoted in a label for each query:

  • All filters applied
  • No filters applied
  • Partially filtered

All filters applied 

When present, all filter parameters are applied successfully on the query.

board_filters_all_filters_applied

No filters applied 

When present, none of the filters are applied to the query because the field(s) do not exist in the query dataset.

board_filters_no_filters_applied

Partially filtered 

If you use more than one filter parameter and only some exist in the query dataset, then the filter parameters are partially applied. Select the label to show the filter parameters that were applied. The parameters that do not exist in the dataset will not be applied.

board_filters_partially_filtered

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