-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 34
Users and Dashboards
istatd allows you to save configured collections of counters. These collections are called dashboards.
For a "logged in" user, you simply press Save Dashboard when the window is configured the way you want it, and give it a name, and it will show up in the list of dashboards on the left. Clicking on a dashboard will recall that window configuration.
Using a little bit of text editing on the server (the preferred istatd text editor is vi) you can copy a particularly nice dashboard from a user's settings file, and paste it into the global dashboards settings file. This will make the dashboard visible to all users. A user trying to save a dashboard with the same name as a global dashboard will not overwrite that dashboard globally, but instead just create a local copy. Because dashboards are only referenced by name, once a user has that local copy, he/she cannot see the global dashboard of the same name without removing or renaming the local dashboard with the same name.
The istatd "user" concept is very loose, and is not a secure way of authorizing users to use the system. We suggest using firewalls to limit access to the system, and if additional access is needed, configure a HTTP proxy such as nginx in front of the istatd HTTP interface to enforce HTTP authentication and perhaps SSL communication.
A "user" in istatd is simply a way of identifying a specific set of configuration options and dashboards. Typing in a user name that is not yet created in the system and pressing Login, will give you the option to create that user file in the system. No special permission is needed to do this. Additionally, the password is simply there to prevent the shallowest level of mistaken logins. It is actually enforced client side!
LDAP integration for user logins would be cool, but we don't want istatd to become a general-purpose application server, and we also don't want to depend on any particular web server for a single istatd instance to be installed. What we have is the best compromise between the various use cases.