1. SPM 7 – Tech Support Training
Dashboards - How often are they updated?
July, 2013

2. Dashboards - Updates

3. What does Last Updated mean?
It’s the last date/time that the gadget’s data was retrieved from the data providers
Each time a gadget is displayed, either during a slideshow or when a user selects the dashboard that contains the gadget, the data on the gadget will be displayed from the cache until the data has ‘expired’
Data expiration occurs when the current date/time is > ‘Last Updated’ date/time + refresh interval
Refresh interval is based on whatever ‘Viewing Period’ has been chosen for the gadget.

4. What determines the refresh interval?
Based on gadget Viewing Period
Stored in Time.Aggregation table in ApplicationModules db
Viewing Period Refresh Rates:
Viewing Period
Refresh Rate
Hourly
Every 15 minutes
Daily
Every hour
Weekly
Every 6 hours
Monthly
Yearly
Every 24 hours

5. More on Refresh Interval
In the Time.Aggregation table in the ApplicationModules database – they can be edited:

6. An example A gadget has a viewing period of ‘Last 2 Weeks’
This is a weekly viewing period – will be updated every six hours
If gadget is displayed on screen at 7/11/ :15 AM, the data will not be refreshed and ‘Last Updated’ time will show 7/11/2013 5:29 AM
If gadget remains on screen, shortly after 11:29:01 AM on 7/11/2013
the refresh indicator will display on bottom left of gadget
Request will be made to the data providers
When data is returned, gadget will be updated with new data
Last Updated time will be changed to the date/time that the data was received from the provider.
If gadget is displayed on screen at 7/11/ :45 AM
cached data will be displayed so user has something to look at.
Since 24 hours have passed, refresh indicator will be displayed and a request will be made to the data providers for new data

7. Additional Information
Gadget data will not get updated again unless the gadget is displayed on screen’
If the dashboard containing our example gadget is not viewed for a month
When it is finally viewed, the ‘Last Updated’ date will be ‘7/10/ :20 AM’ with the associated data from that date/time
Seconds later the refreshed data will be returned by the data providers
Refresh rate of gadget data is not tied to the logging interval
If new logged values have been recorded since the last gadget update, they will be included when the data is refreshed
Logging rate does not affect how often gadgets are updated
Data expiration was implemented to avoid overwhelming data providers with too many requests for data.
Given this implementation, the gadgets on a dashboard will have different refresh intervals

8. Scaling
Scaling is done automatically by the graphing tool based on the min/max values of plotted data.
It could change as new data comes in