A custom dashboard block is a reusable widget that appears on dashboards — a KPI tile, a chart, a recent-activity feed, a status indicator, an embedded form. ActiveManage ships with a small library of built-in blocks and lets you author unlimited custom ones.
Built-In Block Types
- KPI tile: Big number, optional trend arrow and small chart.
- Chart: Bar, line, area, pie, gauge.
- Table: Rows with optional sparklines.
- Status: Green/amber/red traffic light with details.
- Activity feed: Chronological list of recent events.
- Embedded form: Inline form for quick data entry.
- Text/markdown: Notes, announcements, links.
Why Custom Blocks
- Built-ins can't match every business need.
- Embed external content (Grafana panel, BI tool snippet, vendor widget).
- Show a custom-shaped visualisation (waffle chart, calendar heat map, geo map).
- Show a specialised summary tailored to your domain (e.g. “SLA breach risk for top customers”).
How Custom Blocks Are Defined
- Each block has a unique key, a friendly name, and an HTML/template body.
- The body can use platform tokens, JavaScript, and CSS.
- Optionally a data-source declaration so the block automatically receives query results.
- Block is then placeable on any dashboard.
Worked Examples
- SLA traffic light: Red if > 5% tickets are past SLA, amber 1-5%, green < 1%.
- Calendar heat map: Last 90 days of activity colour-coded by daily volume.
- Sales pipeline funnel: Stage counts shown as a funnel chart.
- External Grafana embed: Iframe a Grafana panel with the company auth token.
- NPS dial: Custom semicircle gauge showing the rolling NPS score.