This discussion has been locked. The information referenced herein may be inaccurate due to age, software updates, or external references.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a similar question you can start a new discussion in this forum.

User level view customizations?

One of my teammates got three 4K monitors (effectively a 12K "experience" - does IMAX have that?) and went and reorganized the Solarwinds UI to make use of some of those pixels.

He asked me if that affected my customizations and the answer was yes. Hours of them - gone. His first response was, WHAT? Any user with the right to mess with the UI could mess it up and it's gone forever? His second response was, "sorry".

Hence a question. Given that users - even within the same team (say, SAN, or AD, or VMWare) - have vastly varying tastes and preferences in terms of what information they want to see and how they want to see it (font sizes, available resolutions, number of widgets and charts per column, page, etc.), is there a way to create user-level UI customizations?

If not, how about an ability to clone and "freeze" certain views? E.g. I spend a couple of days playing with a variety of charts and widgets, come up with a view that my teammates might find useful, freeze it, and then let them clone (copy) it and personalize their own copies to their liking?

If not, what are best practices to let users customize their UIs yet leave the base ones alone?

Solarwinds Orion Summary.png

Thank you.

  • Found an option to clone (copy) views but no way to lock or freeze them, or assign them to specific users or groups.

    Any tips on the best practices?

  • If you want a truly unique per user experience, then each user who requires such a view will need their own unique account, they cannot be a member of a group account, as by definition all changes made will apply to all users of the same group (e.g. AD groups, where users are all a member of the same security groups).

    So here's what you'd do:

    1. Create a template view with all your customizations. Call it something suitable 'Team A View Template'. COPY it and assign it to yourself (User A, in this example). Never assign this view to anyone, just leave it as a "template" (quotes because SolarWinds has no such view category at present).
    2. Create a second copy of the template, and call it 'User B View'
    3. Create a unique user account User B, and assign it 'User B view'

    In this example you have three copies of the view you've spent your valuable time tinkering with:

    1. The original, "template" view - Not assigned to anyone, so is safe (unless someone with admin rights messes with it, but then you know who all of your SolarWinds admins are, right? emoticons_wink.png)
    2. The first copy of the template, named accordingly, assigned to User A- You can make any subsequent changes you wish, in the knowledge that the original view is safe
    3. The second copy, also named accordingly, assigned to your teammate - He can make changes to his view if he wishes (if he has customize views rights).

    That's what I tend to do. I also jealously admin rights on instances I manage. Far too many bad experiences. Above all team communication is key, so try to put some kind of shoutbox/distribution group email address in place (if you don't sit next to your fellow admins) and put a policy in place that only content owners can modify their own content at will, and any changes need to go via them (with a trouble ticket in your ticketing system to back it up, if possible).


    Change control is a PITA at the best of times, but in instances like this it's a real life saver.