All aboard: Moving forward with Sumo Logic’s new dashboards

Two years ago, we launched the new Sumo Logic dashboards, which offer many capabilities not found in our “classic” dashboards, including new visualization types (like bubble charts for logs and pie charts for metrics). 

Since the launch, we’ve let you choose between using classic and new dashboards — so you can make the move gradually while we work on adding some features found in the old dashboards to the new dashboards.

Here’s some exciting news: We are very close to achieving functional parity with the classic dashboards.  When this milestone is reached within the next few months, we intend to begin the process of deprecating classic dashboards. Doing so will let us then focus on customer requests for dashboards and align this work exclusively on the new dashboards. 

This blog post outlines our overall plan and classic dashboards migration recommendations so that you can plan ahead.  Further details, including a more specific timeline, will be communicated when full functional parity with key classic dashboards features is reached.

Why adopt the new dashboards?

New dashboards offer many capabilities that are not found in classic to help you get your job done, such as:

Better Visualizations

• New visualization types, including bubble chart, scatter chart, and honeycomb chart for logs; pie chart, bar chart, column chart, and table for metric
• Panels that combine logs and metrics data

More Control

• Longer time range for log panels
• Better visual controls
• Improved time range selectors

Improved Ease of Use

• Context-aware drill-downs
• Recommended dashboards and logs drill-downs
• Easier dashboard creation by adding panels inline
  
  

Overall Migration Plan

Here are the overall steps that we are taking to help you migrate your dashboards.

1. Bring new dashboards to functional parity with the classic dashboards.  It doesn’t mean that all classic dashboard features would be re-implemented the same way, but there will be functional equivalence to the key classic dashboard capabilities.
2. Pre-announce our intention to deprecate Classic dashboards in the middle of 2023 in order to help you plan ahead.  This blog post is part of the pre-announcement.
3. Through our services and support teams, work with you to start migrating your dashboards.
4. Announce more details and a specific timeline of the migration when full functional parity with key classic dashboard features is reached.
5. Automatically migrate remaining dashboards that are not yet migrated on your behalf.  While you can wait for us to perform this automatic migration for you, it is best that you go through your dashboards to perform the migrations yourself.  This approach gives you more control over what gets migrated and the timing of your migrations.
6. Decommission classic dashboards in mid-2023.

What will be added to the new dashboards in the near future?

We are completing the development of key remaining classic features in new dashboards in order to achieve functional parity.  These features include:

• Public Dashboards
• Data Access Level
• Sankey Diagrams (Flow Diagrams)
• Connection Maps
• Box Plot Charts

Other classic dashboard capabilities, such as the ability to zoom in on a panel, are also being implemented.  As these are runtime behaviors that do not affect dashboard migrations, we will continue working to add them back while migrations are carried out concurrently.

How you can prepare to migrate

Are you still using the old dashboards? Here are some steps to consider when planning your dashboard migration:

1. Disseminate information about dashboard migration to all your users who own classic dashboards.
2. Create an inventory of classic dashboards and identify the ones that are being used and should be migrated.  You may not want to migrate the classic dashboards that are no longer useful.  Leverage this as an opportunity to clean things up!
3. You may begin the migration of your classic dashboards using our automatic migration utility now.  Note that this tool is in beta.  While it can already migrate most dashboards, there are still a few cases that it won’t handle yet.
4. The automatic migration tool uses the new dashboard framework to create a copy of your original classic dashboard while keeping your original classic copy untouched.  Please verify that the dashboard is converted properly.  You may have to make some manual adjustments if you use filters on your dashboard.
5. Once you confirm that a dashboard is properly migrated, you may delete the old classic dashboard.

We know change can be hard, but we’re confident that you will like the capabilities that our new dashboards provide. Thank you for working with us through this migration journey — we’re excited to collaborate on even more dashboard capabilities.

More Information

• Documentation - New Dashboards, Migrate to New Dashboards