Kentik Library is the central place in the Kentik portal where our users store and organize their Saved Views and Dashboards, but also where users can find Kentik preset visualizations for a broad set of use cases. Today we release a completely new UX for the Library module, read on.

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Categories folders are replaced by Labels

One of the major changes that you will notice is that categories folders have been replaced with labels - this change results from careful consideration of quite a few factors:

• With recurring requests from users to nest folders, we soon realized that the frontend code behind it was not going to scale well, with the drag and drop across nested folders providing a rather clunky experience.
• The search filter did not play well with folders, as folders would keep being displayed without content if they did not contain any view matching the search
• We noticed in our product analytics that our userbase did not create as many folders as we initially expected
• Users did not have an elegant way to move Dashboards/Saved Views in bulk from one category to another, therefore making administration and organization of these suboptimal.

In parallel, a few things have happened since our last Library Module update:

• Our Product and Design teams had started extending labels to other areas of Kentik Portal: Devices, Synthetic Agents, Synthetic Tests... to the extent that we had built a label management screen in the settings section, and we noticed users were keen on creating labels.
• After releasing the initial version of Role-Based Access Control, some of our users started asking us to extend RBAC capabilities to Dashboards, Saved Views, and Synthetic Monitoring tests in a scalable fashion: having to set rights to these objects on a content-by-content basis would in this case be very tedious and required a method do assign permissions to groups of such items.
  Allowing users to assign common permissions to content based on its label(s) would be an ideal solution to the aforementioned problem.
• Additionally, scaling the Library Categories UI with labels offered all of the benefits of nested folders, without any of the disadvantages.

What can I do with Labels?

In the Library, users are now able to assign multiple labels to their dashboards and saved views.
Additionally, Kentik Presets come with their own, uneditable labels, and they are always represented with an orange label, prefixes with the Kentik logo.

Users can also assign these labels directly from the Dashboard and Saved View edit screens. The Dashboards and Saved Views list can now be filtered by label, to make finding them easier, using a table paradigm that's common and familiar to multiple areas of Kentik Portal.

Additionally, the same label(s) can be applied in bulk to a list of selected Dashboards or Saved Views, making management much more convenient for our users with a lot of content (some of our users have multiple hundreds of Dashboards or Saved Views).

With this release, your former category folders have been ported over to labels and assigned to any content they previously contained.

Anatomy of your new Library

The new Library workflow comes with these components:

1. A top horizontal strip
   Displaying your Favorites and Most Recent views (we'll soon release more features with these favorites, stay tuned !)
   
   
2. A filterable table of all your available content
   Note that your views and Kentik Presets are now together within the same table, with the ability to filter any of them via the Filter Panel.
   
   
3. The search input field
   Allowing you not only to allow text search (on views title and description), but also surfacing the filters from the 4. Filter Panel for quick removal
   
   
4. A full-fledged filter panel
   This search panel now allows our users to search for Dashboards much more efficiently based on: favorite status, whether a subscription exists, labels, their sharing status, the owner as well as which type these are (Dashboards vs Saved Views, and even more precisely the visualization type for a Saved View).
   
   

Next steps

We truly think this new library makes the management and administration tasks for your content much more efficient at a large scale but would love to hear your thoughts about it.
 
In the future, we will add additional metadata to the views available in the Library, such as whether the view is trending within the company, whether the preset view is trending amongst Kentik users, or when the view was last accessed (to facilitate cleanups of older content by admins).

Another thing we're working on that we wanted to tease is how we are planning on letting users navigate saved views directly from Data Explorer, without having to jump back and forth between the Library and Data Explorer - but more to come on that soon ;)

We would also love to hear what future features you'd like to see developed in the Library, do let us know via our dedicated Feature Request portal or your Customer Success team.