One dashboard. Three ways to share.

Everyone counts on you to deliver accurate reports. Internally, you need to:

1. Produce an auditable SLA and uptime report for the CIO
2. Generate a NOC dashboard to put on the wall
3. Keep the platform team on top of cloud spend across Azure and AWS

It’s not just internal dashboards — if you’re a service provider, you need to prove to your clients that you’re meeting SLAs, providing them with accurate KPIs, and communicating escalations, all while accounting for their desired timeframes (last quarter, this month, last 3 hours, etc.).

All of these people need dashboards shared with them, but rarely do they need to see the same stuff. Engineering might want thorough metrics for an application’s back-end, but the CIO just needs a red/amber/green view of service health. The Support Team might need a dashboard on the wall to have up all day, but the Security Team just wants a daily summary at 9 in the morning to see what went wrong overnight.

SquaredUp’s sharing features can appease all of these teams and leadership, but knowing the right path to success means differentiating between shared links, scheduled sharing, and PDF exports. Let’s explore each option:

• Shared Links
• Scheduled Sharing
• PDF Export

Afterwards, I’ll provide some guidance for what makes sense.

Shared Links: stop screenshotting your dashboards.

When you are in charge of crafting and maintaining dashboards for your team, you become responsible for distributing the data to the right people at the right time.

That means Engineering checking in with you every so often to request a screenshot showing the status of their app’s services. For this circumstance (and many others), you have to find your dashboard, get a snapshot of it, and send it over. One of our customers, a Senior Manager for DevOps, was far too familiar with this workflow:

“Before SquaredUp it was a lot of copy-paste, a lot of Slack requests, a lot of hey, what’s this number? How do I see this? So it’s kind of a pain in the butt... the ability to send that all into SquaredUp really hit home for us.”

The Shared Links feature eliminates the need for this grunt work. Just click Share at the top of your SquaredUp dashboard, and you can instantly send out a link to the live data. This link can be publicly viewable, or it can be restricted by email domain so you can ensure that the data only appears in front of the intended recipient groups. Most importantly, viewers don’t need a SquaredUp user license to see the dashboard!

The data is live, view-only, and it refreshes every minute. From the viewer’s perspective, there aren’t any options to edit tiles or wander into different dashboards in your workspace. They get exactly what they need to see: your visually appealing tiles, the data underneath, an adjustable timeframe, and nothing more.

These shared links are revocable too. At any time, you are able to turn off the link from the dashboard’s Sharebutton (or from Settings > Access > Sharing), and this will prevent anyone from viewing the dashboard through that link. You can simply pause access if you want to open it up via the same link in the future, or you can delete the link share outright, which means that sharing the dashboard again requires generating a new link.

Once you’ve integrated shared links into your team’s repertoire, you can put the Engineering status panel and the Support Team’s wallboard up in the office, the CIO gets an on-demand view of service health without needing a license for every tool, and without lifting a finger, your clients get transparency through your live SLA dashboards.

Scheduled Sharing: the dashboard that shows up on time.

Shared links cover a wide array of use cases, but oftentimes people want a predictable rhythm for receiving these dashboard views. For instance, the Security Team has a daily stand-up in the morning, and everyone wants to be on the same page about what needs attention. You are routinely receiving messages and requests for dashboard updates, and your busy week becomes a whole lot more hectic.

What if you could automate this process… set it up one time and forget about it? SquaredUp’s Scheduled Sharing saves the day!

You can eliminate this work entirely by going to the dropdown next to the Share button and selecting Schedule. From there, you can set a cadence for the schedule (e.g., once a month, every Monday at 8:00 AM, etc.) and select any number of destinations across email, Slack, and Teams. Your scheduled message will contain a customized subject, message, and a snapshot of the dashboard at the time the schedule is sent out, with an option for dark or light mode. Additionally, you can include a shared dashboard link, and for your email recipients, you can even add a PDF attachment.

So skip the internal requests, get the data sent to the right people at the right time, and deliver consistent results without jumping through hoops. Make a schedule for 30 minutes before the stand-up, and everyone on the Security Team walks in looking at the same numbers. A weekly send gives the platform team a cloud spend summary every Monday morning, so cost spikes don’t wait for the monthly bill. Delivered on time, every time!

PDF Export: when it needs to be on the record.

That last option in Scheduled Sharing, “Attach a dashboard PDF”, is crucial for auditing purposes. When you enable this option, you get a PDF with your dashboard, its name and timeframe in the header, and the timestamp for when it was generated in the footer.

When the CIO asks for the quarterly SLA report, you want to make sure you are prepared, and you’re definitely aiming to impress. With shared links, you are able to pull in historical data live, but as the days, months, years go by, it becomes harder and harder to prove what the live dashboard showed a few months ago. But a PDF can do it with ease.

Build the dashboard to show this quarter, last quarter and year-over-year side by side, schedule it for the first day of each quarter, and the report arrives without anyone assembling it. File each PDF with the rest of the quarter’s records, and the numbers will be there whenever someone asks what things looked like 6 months ago. Goodbye, guesswork!

Which one, when?

With all of these options, it can be hard to decide the right fit for your scenario. So think about it this way:

1. If they need to see it whenever they want, go with a shared link.
2. If they need to see it at the right moment, go with a scheduled share.
3. If you need to prove what it said, go with a PDF export.

What's next?

Two features in development will take sharing further.

1. Navigation Bar: Currently, every dashboard has its own unique link, so if you want to share six different dashboards with one audience, then you have to provide explanations for which link is related to which view. With this upcoming feature, you will be able to share multiple dashboards with one link.
2. Shared Templates: Locked Variables will make it so you can lock down a Dashboard Variable to a single value when you share, creating a unique shared link for that variable selection. This way, you can reuse a single dashboard template across multiple audiences, locking each shared link to the right data so viewers only see what’s in their scope.

To get some more insights on Sharing in SquaredUp, please feel free to check out this in-depth session from SquaredUp Live covering the topic.

Create an account today to see how SquaredUp’s sharing features can help reduce your workload while keeping your organization and its clients happy!