Feature Highlight: Organize Your Dashboards into Hierarchies
Every IoT deployment starts with a handful of dashboards. As the deployment scales with new production lines, more sites, or another floor of sensors, that flat list quickly turns into an unmanageable dashboard sprawl. The resulting maintenance overload and decision fatigue become the quiet tax every growing monitoring system starts to pay.
JEDI 4.1 addresses the sprawl with the addition of dashboard hierarchy. You can now bring in structure by organizing dashboards into logical, nested paths without creating a separate folder manager or a tagging scheme
Feature that Simplifies Complex Structures
Effective hierarchies connect monitoring views through clear navigation while ensuring easier maintenance and scaling as requirements change. Here’s how JEDI establishes these relationships and implements the feature.
Path-Based Organization: Hierarchy is created by the slash-delimited dashboard path. Dashboards that share a parent path are grouped under it automatically.
Breadcrumbs and Drill-Down Navigation: Paths appear as breadcrumbs in the navigation sidebar, while the Link Dashboard option in charts lets users navigate to context-specific dashboards.
Flexible Access Control: JEDI provides global admin access to all dashboards and user group access which can be curated as needed.
Easy Reorganization: Move dashboards to a different branch or regroup them just by changing the path, without rebuilding them or breaking the links.
Simple Scalability: Since the structure lives in the path, adding a new dashboard is enough to scale. No separate tree needs to be built or maintained.
Flexible Hierarchy Depth: JEDI allows five nesting levels plus the dashboard itself as the final level.
How JEDI Compares with Grafana and ThingsBoard in Dashboard Hierarchy
While Grafana and ThingsBoard excel in largescale, complex hierarchical structures, JEDI excels in lightweight implementation that is easy to approach and maintain. Here’s how the three platforms compare and what makes each the right tool for the right deployment.
Capability | Machinechat JEDI | Grafana | ThingsBoard |
|---|---|---|---|
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) | Global (admin) and user group-based | Organization, team, folder-based | Hierarchy-based |
Nested Hierarchy Structure | Path-based | Flat folder structure with dynamic filtering | Recursive, N-level asset relations built around business entities |
Hierarchy Depth | 5 + 1 (final level being a dashboard) | Up to 4 folder levels | Unlimited |
Drill-Down Mechanism | Sidebar breadcrumbs & links to context-specific dashboards | High-level overview dashboard links to context-specific sub-dashboards | State-based dashboard views with context injected by entity aliases |
Dashboard Building | Simple drag-and-drop logic | Requires knowledge of database querying | Requires knowledge of core building blocks, configuration concepts, and front-end customization |
Setup Complexity | Low | Medium | High |
Best For | On-premises, edge deployments, and private IoT servers | Cross-stack observability and analytical charting | Managed service providers (MSPs) and enterprises with distinct access needs |
Creating Dashboard Hierarchies:
Building a hierarchy in JEDI requires one additional step to specifying the path. The hierarchy is created as you add your dashboards.
Add New Dashboard Hierarchy in JEDI
Go to Settings > Dashboards and click Add Dashboard.
Enter the full path under the Name field, separating each level with a "/". For example: Metro Campus/Building 3/Floor 5/North Wing/Server Room/Temperature & Power
Choose a dashboard Type and add the dashboard.
Organize to Reflect Your Needs
There is no single hierarchy that works for every IoT deployment. An effective structure is one that reflects how your facility is organized, how your equipment relates to other systems, and how users need to access information.
Most deployments can be organized along one or more of these approaches:
Operational Hierarchy
Organize dashboards around the flow of day-to-day operations. A high-level dashboard can present the KPIs and overall state of a facility, while the lower levels provide visibility into individual production areas, processes, and equipment.
Example: Factory/Production Floor/Production Line
Asset/Physical Hierarchy
Represent the relationships between physical assets, from a site or facility down to individual machines and equipment. Apart from providing a complete picture of equipment health, it also helps maintenance and operations teams monitor equipment in the context of the larger system it belongs to.
Example: Plant/Packaging Line/Conveyor System
Spatial Hierarchy
Organize dashboards by physical location of a device or system when it’s the most natural starting point for monitoring. This can be particularly useful for facilities with multiple buildings, floors, or rooms. A laboratory dashboard could combine temperature, humidity, air quality, and equipment status.
Example: Campus/Building A/Floor 2/Laboratory
Tactical/Role-Based Nesting
Bridge strategic long-term goals and real-time operations by increasing the level of abstraction that matches each role. Grant the relevant User Groups access to the dashboards under the relevant branch. Role-based structure can also combine an operational or physical hierarchy.
Example: Production Monitoring/Shift Performance/Frontline Operations
System and Functions
Organize dashboards around the systems that keep a facility running, such as HVAC, lighting, elevators, and power distribution. This is especially effective when different teams are responsible for distinct building systems or when monitoring requires visibility across multiple functions.
Example: HVAC Systems/Office Building C/Floor 3/Room 2
Use Cases
Hierarchy becomes especially valuable when a deployment spans multiple sites, interconnected equipment, or distinct operational responsibilities. JEDI helps teams organize these systems around real-world workflows for effective management of monitoring deployments.
Some use cases include:
Building and Facilities Monitoring: Campus dashboard provides an overview of building conditions and energy use. Building dashboard combines power consumption and HVAC status. Room dashboard can show environmental conditions and equipment status.
Greenhouse and Agricultural Monitoring: Site dashboard summarizes conditions across greenhouses. Greenhouse dashboard combines air temperature, humidity, irrigation flow, light levels, and ventilation status. Equipment dashboard can show the operating state and power consumption of supporting systems.
Manufacturing Operations: An overview dashboard for production output, energy consumption, and equipment status. Production-line dashboard combines relevant metrics such as machine state, temperature, vibration, and power consumption to show the line's overall operating condition. Equipment-level dashboards provide more detailed information when a machine requires investigation.
Since JEDI runs entirely on premises with local storage, each remote site can run its own instance and hierarchy without a cloud account or subscription. This makes it a perfect fit for private IoT servers, remote facilities, and air-gapped environments where sending data off-site isn’t an option.
If you’re already running JEDI, upgrade to v4.1.0 or later to explore dashboard hierarchies. If not, download the trial and explore what JEDI is capable of.
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