Hello! Welcome to "Introduction to Dashboards". I'm Chris from Splunk Education. In this module, we will learn about the Splunk dashboard framework, how to create dashboard prototypes, and how to customize colors and layout using Splunk Dashboard Studio. Splunk provides two frameworks for creating dashboards: the Classic Dashboard and Dashboard Studio. Both frameworks have some commonalities. For example, both provide a graphical editor as well as a source code editor. Both provide visualizations which are driven by searches. But there are differences as well. Some visualizations are only available in the Classic Dashboard, while other visualizations are only available in the Dashboard Studio framework. Also, layouts are different. The Classic Dashboard has a row and column layout, while Dashboard Studio provides two different layouts: an absolute layout and a grid layout. Dashboard Studio uses a JSON source code, while the classic dashboard uses an XML-based source code. Dashboard Studio allows for visualizations to be layered on top of each other. Some of the visualizations that are not available in the Classic Dashboard but are available in Dashboard Studio are icons, shapes and text boxes. The new Dashboard Studio framework is undergoing changes. Currently, there are two types of visualizations you can see in the source code. Visualizations with the "splunk" prefix and visualizations that have the "viz" prefix. Eventually, all visualizations will migrate to the Splunk prefix. This is important because how you encode options is slightly different. We'll see this later on in this module. Dashboards, also known as Views, are scoped to your application context. They exist in the application they were created in. However, there is a view management screen that allows you to actually change various attributes of the dashboard or view, such as moving them to different application contexts, deleting them, making copies of them, and opening them up and sharing them. If you have a view that you wish to migrate from one application to another, you simply need to find it in the view management screen. To get to the view management screen, you click on Settings, User interfaces, Views. Select the application in which the particular dashboard or view exists, set the owner to yourself, and then you have the option to either open the dashboard, make a copy of it, move it to another application context, or remove the dashboard altogether. Dashboard Studio right now is incorporated into both Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud. Originally it was a standalone application you would download from Splunkbase called the Dashboard Studio Beta. If you have both the Dashboard Studio Beta versions of dashboards and your version of Splunk also has the now automatically-installed version of Dashboard Studio, you'll want to migrate those Dashboard Studio Beta dashboards out of the Dashboard Studio application and into some other application, like maybe the Search & Reporting application. If your dashboard has any custom visualizations or images, you'll also want to make sure that you upload those images and visualizations into the new application context. Splunk provides a mechanism for converting classic dashboards into Dashboard Studio. Not all classic dashboards will successfully convert into Dashboard Studio. Elements of a classic dashboard attempted to convert into Dashboard Studio dashboards that aren't successful will be indicated in the dashboard itself. The conversion process does not make any changes to the classic dashboard, but rather copies the dashboard into a new dashboard and converts that copy into the new dashboard framework. It will convert the XML code into the corresponding JSON code and map any visualizations from the classic dashboard into the corresponding visualizations in the new dashboard framework. Let's take a look and see how we can do this. To convert a dashboard that's created in the classic framework, you open the classic framework dashboard up, then come over to the ellipses and choose "Clone in Dashboard Studio". When it does this, it'll convert this into the Absolute layout. Right now, for conversion, the only supported layout is Absolute. Notice it gives a different name and a different internal ID. I'm going to change this, and I will click Save. It has converted my classic dashboard into a clone that is using the new dashboard framework. We'll take a look at the details later on this, but I can take a look and take notice of the JSON-based source code in my newly converted dashboard. We can see the original dashboard is untouched and we see the new converted dashboard. I can open up the original classic dashboard, go into edit mode and take a look at its source code as well. I can see the XML based source code. That's how you convert a classic dashboard into a dashboard that's using the new Dashboard Studio framework.
