Dashboards

Every other ISE screen is an operator’s working surface: dense, interactive, read at a desk. A dashboard is the opposite. It answers one question — is everything we own OK right now? — from across the room, with no login and no navigation.

It differs from the Overview screen in four ways that are all deliberate: it is rolled up rather than itemised, glanceable rather than explorable, latched rather than live-only, and — for the wallboard route — public.

Services are curated, not discovered

A service is a curated view, not an estate entity: it points at one or more estate groups, and its members are the de-duplicated union of those groups’ members. “Kora” might be one group or three.

Keeping services out of the entity graph is what lets the same group front several services, and a service compose several groups, without any of it polluting the estate that investigations traverse. Retired entities are excluded — something gone from the world must not pad a member count or hold a tile red.

What makes a tile red

Each service has a warn section and an alert section of rules. A section trips if any of its rules match, and the tile takes the worse of the two. Two rule shapes:

• Asset count — N or more member assets each carrying a present signal at a severity floor or worse. “Kora is red when 2 or more assets are critical.”
• Signal match — a present signal whose title matches a pattern, at a severity floor or worse. “Amber when anything matches CertExpiry.” Patterns are validated when you save, so a typo fails in the editor rather than silently in the evaluator.

Severity is always a minimum — “high or worse” — because that is how operators think.

Webhook-sourced alerts are excluded from dashboard evaluation, because a push source has no reliable all-clear: a sender that simply goes quiet would otherwise latch a service red forever with no path back to green.

Four levels, and grey is not green

ok · warn · alert · unknown

A service whose groups resolve to no live members is unknown (grey), never ok. An empty board that reads as healthy is the one failure a status wall must never have. Grey says “I can’t tell you” — which is the truth, and prompts you to check the service’s groups.

The status word is always written, never colour alone: accessibility, and TVs with poor colour reproduction.

Latching

By default a tripped section latches: it holds its state after the condition clears, until an operator manually clears it — an audited action. Auto-clear is opt-in per section for genuinely self-healing signals.

The default is to latch because a wall that silences itself is a wall a team learns to ignore. A blip at 3am that cleared by 9am is exactly what the wall exists to show.

Tiles carry status age (“red for 23m”) and show a stale-data indicator rather than freezing green if evaluation stops — a board that lies quietly is worse than one that admits it is out of date.

Acknowledging an incident does not turn a tile green. Acknowledgement means eyes-on, not resolved; a tile tracks whether the condition is present and shows a small acknowledged marker instead.

The wallboard

The operator screens are session-authenticated. The wallboard is not — it hangs in physical space, so it is reachable at a chromeless, login-free /board/{token} route designed for a TV: dark-friendly, auto-refreshing, and fit-to-screen — it never scrolls, because off-screen tiles are invisible exactly when nobody is at the keyboard.

That route is deliberately minimal. It exposes only the two dashboard reads, scoped to its token; nothing else in the API is reachable through it. Board tokens are minted and revoked by an admin in Settings, shown once on creation — the URL is the credential. Revocation kills the URL immediately, and an unknown token returns a plain not-found rather than an auth error, so the public route reveals nothing about which tokens exist.

Practical legibility tops out around sixteen tiles. Beyond that the answer is curation, not scrolling.

Next

• Tags — the groups a service is built from.
• Signals & incidents — what “a present signal” means.