6.3 Dashboards, Boards and Metric Sources: Trends, Its Replacement and Migration

6.3 Dashboards, Boards and Metric Sources: Trends, Its Replacement and Migration

Quick overview: Many Tanium environments still contain Trends boards, and a great deal of third-party study material still teaches Trends as the reporting surface. It is not. Tanium Trends is deprecated and has been replaced by Tanium Reporting. An operator needs to recognise Trends objects, understand the source model they are built on, and know that new work belongs in Reporting.

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1. Deprecation status: know this before you study Trends

Tanium's guidance is unambiguous: Trends boards that are actively being used should be migrated to Tanium Reporting. A migration wizard is available in the Trends workbench.

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2. The Trends object model

Understanding this model is still worth an operator's time, because Reporting inherits its shape and because migrated content carries its fingerprints.

   BOARD                 a collection of panels
     |
     +-- SECTION         a logical divider within a board
            |
            +-- PANEL    one visualisation
                   |
                   +-- SOURCE   where the panel's data comes from

Panels depend on sources. You must create a saved question source, or select a module source, before you can create a panel that uses it.

The two source types

Facts about saved question sources that catch people out

• Every source issues its saved question to all computer groups visible to Trends — not to a group you pick per source.
• Creating a source creates a saved question named after the source, with the string Trends prepended. A source named Chassis Type produces the saved question Trends Chassis Type. That convention exists so you can filter for Trends questions in the saved questions and question history tables — and it explains those unfamiliar Trends … entries in Administration > Content > Saved Questions.
• A Trends saved question can ask for results from only one sensor. One metric per source.
• When a saved question source uses a multi-column sensor, you choose which column to display.

Facts about module sources

• They are created when you import a Tanium solution.
• You cannot create or edit them, but you can disable them to stop data being stored.
• Access permissions for the solution that provides the data control access to the module source — not a separate Trends permission.

Notice how directly this carries over into Reporting, where module sources are likewise uncreatable, uneditable, and usable only for dashboard charts.

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3. Migrating a board to Reporting

The migration converts boards into Reporting dashboards and processes the panels according to their source type.

What does not survive

Historical data is not migrated. For dashboard panels that use historical data — an area chart, for example — Reporting starts collecting only when the dashboard is created. A migrated panel may initially display Collecting initial data, and that is expected rather than a fault.

Permissions and follow-up

• Migrating boards and sources requires the Trends export role permission.
• After migration, verify each board: check the dashboard exists, resolve errors, and expand the dashboard to confirm the corresponding Reports were created for saved question sources. Migrated reports can be listed at Data > Reports by selecting the Trends Migrated label.
• Replace any Tanium Connect connections that exported Trends boards or sources with connections that export the corresponding Reporting dashboards and reports. A migration that leaves the old connections in place quietly stops delivering data.

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4. Reading a dashboard well

Whether the object is a legacy board or a Reporting dashboard, the interpretation skills from section 5.4 apply.

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5. What to do with what you find