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The dashboard

The first thing you see after signing in, and the page most people never change. It is worth ten minutes, because two of its default tiles are the most misread numbers on the platform.

What it is

A grid of tiles — widgets — each answering one question. You can have several dashboards, switch between them, set one as your default, duplicate one to experiment, and decide which roles see which. Reset to default puts the standard layout back if you have rearranged it into something you regret.

Everything on it is cached briefly, so a tile can lag reality by a minute or so. The Right Now page is the one to open when a minute matters.

The default layout

Eleven tiles, top to bottom:

TileAnswersRead it as
GatewaysHow many, how many onlineThe first number to check when anything else looks wrong. One offline gateway explains a floor of missing data.
DevicesHow many registeredHardware you own, not hardware that works — see the next tile for that.
Device statusOnline / stale / offline, and how many have a low batteryOnline is heard in the last five minutes, stale five to fifteen, offline longer. A tag that is not moving can be stale and fine.
LocationsHow many sites
Device trendDistinct locations with activity, per hour, last twelve hoursA location is "live" in an hour if any of its gateways reported. A dip is a gateway outage before it is anything else.
Gateway statusThe online / offline split, as a chartThe Gateways tile, drawn.
Live devicesThe 25 most recently heard devices and which zone each is in nowWhere things are, right now, from the same positioning the floor plan uses.
Enter / ExitDoorway crossings, todayCrossings, not people in the building. Someone who steps out for coffee is two enters and two exits.
DwellHow long devices stayed, bucketedA stay is one device in one zone — not a person, not a visit.
ProtocolWhat the traffic is, by protocolMostly a health check: if a protocol you rely on drops to zero, something upstream stopped.
Device typesTags, sensors, beacons, gatewaysThe shape of your estate.

The two tiles that mislead

Visitors today is on the gallery and often added. It counts distinct devices detected, not people. Phones with randomised MAC addresses inflate it; a person carrying two tags counts twice; a person carrying nothing does not count at all. It is a footfall proxy, and only a rough one.

It also has a quirk you will notice within a day. The daily total is written once, at the end of the day in UTC, so for most of your working day "today" has no row yet. Rather than show zero and a −100 % change until the following morning, the tile shows the most recent day with traffic — which means the number you see at 3 p.m. is yesterday's, labelled as today. It is deliberate, and it is still worth knowing.

Enter / Exit counts crossings. It is not how many people are inside, and in-minus-out is only that when every door is counted — see people counters.

For a real headcount, add the Right Now zones tile: it shows the same fused occupancy as the Right Now page, with its source, so a tag count can never sit on your dashboard dressed as a headcount. Occupancy: which number is which is the page behind that tile.

Add any of these from the widget picker.

Counts

TileShows
Visitors this weekThe same distinct-device proxy, over seven days
Licence daysDays left on your licence — worth having somewhere visible
EntitiesHow many people, assets and guests you track, and how many have a tag bound right now

Charts

TileShows
Visitors over timeThe device proxy, as a line
HourlyActivity by hour of day

Rankings

TileShows
Top locations · venues · gateways · devicesThe busiest of each, by traffic
Top crowd flowsThe commonest zone-to-zone movements — which room leads to which

Tables

TileShows
GatewaysEvery gateway, its state and last report
Recent rawThe last packets received, decoded — the tile to open when you want to see data actually arriving

Pictures

TileShows
Floor plan slideshowEach venue's plan with live devices drawn on it, cycling
Location mapEach site with its venue, zone and gateway counts, cycling

Live

TileShows
Right Now zonesOccupancy per zone, with source and status — the honest headcount
Live alerts feedWhat has fired recently

Utility

TileShows
Organisation cardYour organisation's details and plan
Audit trailRecent administrator actions

Setting one up for a role

Dashboards can be made visible per role. The combination that works in most buildings:

  • Everyone — Gateways, Device status, Right Now zones, Live alerts. The four things that tell you whether the platform is working and what it is seeing.
  • Facilities — add Top crowd flows, Dwell, the floor plan slideshow.
  • Whoever pays for it — add Licence days and Entities.

When it disappoints

Every count is zero. Check Gateways first. No gateways online means no data, and every other tile is downstream.

Visitors today shows yesterday. It is meant to — see above. The number updates after the daily rebuild.

A tile says "temporarily unavailable". Its data source errored; the error is logged, the rest of the dashboard is unaffected. If it persists past a refresh, it is usually a report table that has not been created for the current month yet.

Live devices is empty but devices are online. Positioning has not placed them yet — they are heard but not yet in a zone. Give it a few minutes, then check that the venue has gateways positioned on its plan.

Last updated:

Omaya platform documentation