Dashboards GA: Introducing Splunk Dashboard Studio

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We are thrilled to announce the general availability launch of Splunk Dashboard Studio, our new and intuitive dashboard-building experience to easily communicate even your most complex data stories. This new option for building dashboards will ship free with all new releases of Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise starting with Splunk Cloud 8.1.2103 and Splunk Enterprise 8.2.

If you've been using the Splunk Dashboard app (beta), most of the features should feel familiar, as we enhanced the latest version of the Splunk Dashboard app (beta) and embedded it into the Search & Reporting app within the main product. This means you now enjoy two dashboard editor options - Classic Dashboards (our traditional Simple XML dashboards) and Dashboard Studio!

Dashboard Studio has advanced visualization tools and flexible layout options to easily create visually-compelling, pixel perfect dashboards. It offers out-of-the-box support for dashboard customization and an intuitive editing interface that enables new and experienced users to easily create the visualizations. This dashboard builder has a wide range of capabilities so in this blog we will focus on the new features since the last release of the Dashboard Beta app. For details on all the capabilities, you can check out the documentation and keep an eye out for more blogs!

This blog post will cover:

• How to access Splunk Dashboard Studio from Search & Reporting
• The new conditional coloring capabilities and UI configuration for Single Value, Single Value Icon, Table, and Choropleth SVG visualizations
• How to wire multiple visualizations to a single data source
• Expanded defaults support
• How to migrate dashboards from the Splunk Dashboard app (beta) to Splunk Dashboard Studio.
  
  

Splunk Dashboard Studio in Search & Reporting

You can access Splunk Dashboard Studio directly within the Search & Reporting app. From the Dashboards listing page, you will see a unified table for dashboards in Classic Dashboards (Simple XML) and Dashboard Studio. You'll also notice some resource cards we've added to the top to provide quick links to the Dashboard Studio Examples Hub, Dashboard Studio documentation, and Classic Dashboards (Simple XML) documentation. 

When you click to "Create New Dashboard", you'll have the option to create your dashboard as a Classic Dashboard or in Dashboard Studio. If you select Dashboard Studio, you have two layout options: Absolute layout for pixel-perfect positioning (think of it like a free-form canvas) and Grid layout for quick and neat arrangement of charts.
 

You can also save visualizations from Search to Dashboard Studio. Once you've perfected your SPL query and have selected the visualization you want to save, click the "Save As" menu above the search bar. If you save your visualization to a new dashboard, you'll have to select between Classic Dashboards and Dashboard Studio, similar to the Dashboards page.

Note that there are some visualizations that are available in Search/Classic Dashboards (Simple XML) but are not supported in Dashboard Studio, such as custom visualizations or visualizations with Trellis enabled. You will not be able to save these visualizations to Dashboard Studio. You can view a comparison chart between Classic Dashboards and Dashboard Studio in the docs. 

New Single Value, Table, and Choropleth SVG Visualizations

This GA release of Dashboard Studio also comes with enhanced visualizations for Single Value, Single Value Icon, Table, and Choropleth SVG. Compared to the Splunk Dashboard app (beta) visualizations, these visualizations have more flexibility and formatting options. For example, if you have a Single Value on your dashboard, you can choose to dynamically color a variety of combinations of the major value, trend, and background color.

You can select from predefined color palettes or you can customize a color palette by specifying HEX values. You can select between light color palettes (recommended for dark mode dashboards) or dark color palettes (recommended for light mode dashboards). You can add or remove ranges, and if you want to flip the order of the colors, there's a button for that! 

For table visualizations, you can now select each column you want to format, and each column can be formatted differently.

In Splunk Dashboard Studio, you can wire up multiple visualizations to a single data source. Let's say you create a single data source that returns multiple KPIs: KPI1=54, KPI2=79, and KPI3=22.

You would wire this data source up to three separate Single Value visualizations and just specify which field (KPI) you want to be displayed in each Single Value. The end result is that the search is only executed once, but can populate three visualizations. This is one way to reduce the number of queries executed per dashboard! 

Expanded Defaults Support

Dashboards in Splunk Dashboard Studio have the ability to specify default settings for visualizations and data sources. Imagine you have 15 single value visualizations and you want to apply the same thresholding conditions to each single value. Rather than manually set up thresholding on each visualization, you can specify it in the defaults stanza. 

Let's say you have a single value visualization with dynamic thresholding. 

In the source code for that visualization, you will see a "context" stanza which specifies the ranges and colors, and an "options" stanza which connects the ranges to the component you want to dynamically color (i.e. the major value, the trend, the background). 

To set this as a default for all Single Value visualizations, you will first add a new section under "defaults" and under "visualizations" called "splunk.singlevalue". This is where you will specify the defaults for Single Value visualizations. Under "splunk.singlevalue" you will create two stanzas for "options" and "context" and cut and paste contents of the "options" and "context" stanza from the visualization. 

And now, all three KPIs are abiding by the thresholding conditions, but it was only specified once! This also means that when you need to make changes, you only have to make changes once in the defaults section, and all association visualizations will update. If you apply any changes directly on a visualization, those changes will override the global defaults. This allows you to have the flexibility of multiple visualizations with different options, and also the time savings of leveraging dashboard defaults. 

Migrating From the Splunk Dashboard App (Beta)

If you were previously using the Splunk Dashboard app (beta), you can migrate your beta dashboards into Search & Reporting and continue to work on them in the GA supported Dashboard Studio. To migrate your dashboards out of the Splunk Dashboard app (beta), go to Settings > User Interface > Views. Change the app to "Splunk Enterprise Dashboards Beta (splunk-dashboard-app)" and click "Move" in the Actions column for any dashboards you want to move.

Once you've moved your dashboards, you can disable or remove the app from your Search Head so that none of your users accidentally continue to use the beta app. 

Next Steps

If you would like to see Dashboard Studio in action and have a step-by-step walkthrough of the capabilities, we encourage you to watch the demo and for more details explore the resources below.

We hope you love Dashboard Studio as much we do! If you try it, please send us your feedback at dashboard-studio@splunk.com!

Resources

• Splunk Dashboard Studio Documentation
• Splunk Ideas - Dashboard Studio for feature or enhancement Requests
• Examples Hub - Find the Examples Hub from the Dashboards page in Search & Reporting
• Splunk Community - Dashboards & Visualizations for questions 
  
  

Coming Soon

• Expanded tokens and drill down functionality 
• Additional enhanced visualizations
• Ability to set a Studio Dashboard as your home dashboard
  
  

^{*This information is subject to change at any time, at the sole discretion of Splunk LLC and without notice. This roadmap information shall not be incorporated into any contract or other commitment. Splunk undertakes no obligation to either develop or deliver any product, features, or functionality described here.}