shopdb-flask/docs/proposals/dashboard-live-fleet.md

Proposal: a dashboard that shows the fleet, not the row count

• Status: DRAFT
• Date: 2026-08-11
• Author: cproudlock
• Relates to: ADR-010 (frontend plugin hooks), ADR-013 / ADR-014 (lean per-site builds), ADR-006 (collector contract), ADR-012 (GE-Enforce manifest ownership)

The problem

The dashboard reports totals: assets, machines, PCs, network devices, printers, measuring tools. Those numbers are true every day and actionable on none of them. Nobody opens the page to learn there are 417 assets.

Meanwhile the system already knows things worth acting on and shows them nowhere:

• a bay returned 500 to every collector report for a day and a half, and the only evidence was a log file on the PC
• eleven part markers' backups were overwriting each other for weeks
• a PC can stop reporting entirely and nothing says so
• GE-Enforce records enforcement failures, stale manifests and repeated self-heals, and none of it surfaces outside a report modal

Every one of those was found by someone going to look. The dashboard should be where they find you.

What already exists

Two discoveries shaped this proposal.

The plugin mechanism is built and dead. BasePlugin.get_dashboard_widgets exists, GET /api/dashboard/widgets aggregates across enabled plugins, skips disabled ones, isolates a broken plugin in production and sorts by position. Five plugins - notifications, network, machines, computers, printers - already declare widgets.

Nothing consumes it. The frontend never calls the endpoint, and not one of the declared components (PrinterStatusWidget, ComputerStatusWidget, MachineStatusWidget, NotificationsWidget, NetworkStatusWidget) exists. The declarations point at components that were never written.

So this is less "build a dashboard" than "finish one", plus a contract fix.

The data is already collected. Nothing here needs a new collector field:

Signal	Source
PC reporting / silent	computers.lastreporteddate
Machine has a controlling PC	controls links, collector:machine
Backed up, stale, never	backuprevisions per asset and kind
Enforcement failed	manifestenforcementreports.status, failedcount
Which entry failed, and why	manifestenforcementresults.action, exitcode, message
Stale manifest	report appliedversion versus the scope's published version
Drift that will not stick	repeated selfhealed results for one entry
Enforcer version spread	manifestenforcementreports.enforcerversion
Installed software and versions	computerinstalledapps
Toner critical / low	printer supplies, Zabbix-fed
Warranty expiring	warranty plugin
Mis-numbered bays	the check-shared-machines query

Proposed change to the widget contract

The existing contract names a component per widget. That does not scale and does not survive a lean build: every widget needs a bespoke Vue component, and a plugin-provided component has to be staged into the frontend bundle to exist at all.

ADR-010 already solved this for asset panels: a plugin declares render: 'list' or 'keyvalue' or 'tabs' plus a map of fields, and a GENERIC core component renders it. Do the same here. A plugin declares data and shape; core owns the rendering.

{
    'id': 'geenforce-failures',
    'title': 'Enforcement failures',
    'endpoint': '/api/geenforce/dashboard/failures',
    'render': 'exceptions',        # generic renderer
    'severity': 'critical',        # critical | warning | info
    'permission': 'geenforce.view',
    'position': 10,
    'empty': 'hide',               # hide | line
    'map': {
        'title': 'hostname',
        'detail': 'entryname',
        'meta': [{'key': 'message'}, {'key': 'exitcode'}],
        'link': '/pcs/{computerid}',
    },
}

Three renderers cover everything listed above:

• exceptions - a list of things that are wrong, each linking to the thing
• metric - a single number with a trend or threshold, for the cases where the count IS the story (toner critical: 3)
• list - recent items, for notifications and KB adds

Principles

An exception board, not a stat board. The default view is what needs a person today. A count appears only where the count is the story.

Empty cards must shrink. A card that says "nothing wrong" every day trains people to stop reading the page. That is exactly how ntlars-backup.log reached 3,234 lines with 17 that mattered. empty: 'hide' is the default; 'line' for the few where absence is itself news.

Every row links to the thing. A dashboard that says three printers are low without linking to them is a worse version of a report.

Cards respect RBAC. A card declares a permission; a user without it never sees the card or its endpoint. Toner levels are not sensitive, but "which PCs expose VNC" is, and the dashboard must not become a way around role gating.

Thresholds are settings with neutral defaults (ADR-015): quiet window, toner percentage, warranty horizon. Every site will disagree with the numbers.

One endpoint per card, lazily loaded, failing independently. A hung Zabbix call must not blank the page.

Wave one

Cards whose data is already reliable, ordered by how actionable they are:

1. Enforcement failures - current reports with status = failed, showing the failing entry and exit code.
2. PCs not reporting - lastreporteddate beyond the quiet window, and PCs with no GE-Enforce report at all, which is a different and worse case.
3. Backups missing or stale - machines with no revision of a kind their PC type should produce, and revisions older than the interval.
4. Toner critical, then low - links to the printer, then to its admin page.
5. Warranties expiring - within the configured horizon.
6. Mis-numbered bays - check-shared-machines, promoted from a CLI command nobody will remember to run.

Then, lower and quieter: stale manifest versions, repeated self-heals, enforcer version spread, active notifications, recent application and KB additions.

Wave two: desired versus observed

The highest-value card and the most work. The manifest declares what a PC type should have; computerinstalledapps records what it does; filters.py already decides which entries apply to a given PC. Diffing those answers "which bays are missing something they should have" - which nothing in the system answers today, and which is the thing GE-Enforce exists to guarantee.

Deferred to wave two because it needs the resolver wired into a query path, and because wave one needs nothing new.

Risks

Aggregate queries on the most-visited page. These are fleet-wide scans on every load. Cache 30-60 seconds, and log slow cards - a lazily-loaded card can be slow for months before anyone mentions it.

Cards become the new noise. Six cards that are always empty are as useless as one number that never changes. If a card is empty for a month, delete it.

Plugin gating must be real. A lean site without printers must render no toner card. The existing endpoint already skips disabled plugins; the frontend must not hardcode a card list alongside it.

Non-goals

• Per-user dashboard customisation. Later, if asked for.
• Historical charting. This is a "what needs doing now" board; trends belong in reports.
• Replacing the shopfloor TV dashboard, which is a different audience with different needs.