Why do we need dashboards?

Using IBM Concert Operate (formerly Cloud Pak for AIOps), clients can integrate, correlate, and manage data from many different sources, providing a comprehensive platform to stay in control of their IT operations. The standard user interfaces provide a variety of ways to visualise data such as alerts, incidents, and topology, and these will continue to evolve in the future as they provide critical functionalities for all clients.

However, many clients want to be able to show data in different ways; ways that may be unique to their business, or even perhaps individual lines of business within their organisation. The answer to this is dashboards, and in Concert Operate we now provide a couple of keyways to achieve this: Cognos Analytics, and our own UI Extension Toolkit.

Cognos provides a fantastic suite of tools for combining data, modelling it, and creating scheduled reports as well as interactive dashboards. If you are interested in in-depth analysis of your data, and reports to go with, then this is the answer for you. Review our detailed guide for info on integrating Cognos with your system.

In some cases, you may just want a quick dashboard to visualise some data from an API, be it a summary of Alerts, a map of resource locations, or perhaps a combination of both. This is where the toolkit shines – it provides a simple platform to build custom pages that can include existing Concert Operate widgets, such as the Alert List or Topology Viewer, custom React based interfaces, and iframed content from external pages.

So where does GenAI fit in?

For this example, I’m using IBM Bob, an AI SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) partner that augments your existing workflows and helps you work confidently with real codebases. For more information on Bob, follow the link: IBM Bob

How does it work?

In this example, I ask Bob to create a simple dashboard to showcase the core functionality of both the toolkit and him:

In a matter of seconds, Bob has got to work and created a Todo List highlighting the path he is going to take to create the dashboard. 

I’m using ‘Advanced’ mode for this exercise, and other than some simple custom rules that prompt Bob to follow certain practices around linting, testing, and internationalisation, it is used as it comes out of the box. After a matter of minutes, and a few approvals for various steps (most of which you can shift to an auto-approve if you wish for future dashboards/coding), Bob has finished his work and provides a clear summary of what has been done:

Now whilst Bob is fantastic at getting the ball rolling with development, like all GenAI coding tools he isn’t perfect. In this case, there was a minor TypeScript issue that needed resolving so I simply told Bob and he quickly sorted it:


After some more minor back and forth, plus an additional request from me to generate some sample data for this use-case, I had a dashboard available to test and could run it locally to test:



Whilst it may not win any design awards up front, it provides a great starting point to build upon, and of course I can continue to iterate and improve using Bob. With a few design requests to Bob, and some actual data on the AIOps cluster, I can get the dashboard functioning and show a live status of my alerts.


One of the key benefits of using tools like Bob is the power to iterate fast, and from here I can provide a few more quick prompts to develop a second dashboard that is based off the first, but with added context around the weather as shown in the initial example.

Note that the examples shown would be directly available in the cluster navigation too. Follow the deployment process in the toolkit and test it in your own environment.

Hopefully this blog provides some inspiration for building dashboard for Concert Operate. Give it a try or speak to your IBM team for more information!

Key links
https://github.com/IBM/aiops-ui-extension-toolkit
https://bob.ibm.com/