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March 2026: Custom Dashboards, Connector Health, and Dashboard-Level Alerts

March 28, 2026 • ShardAnalytics Team • 3 min read

March focuses on making server dashboards more customizable and giving operators deeper visibility into player client environments and connector plugin health.

Custom Dashboards & Drag-and-Drop Layouts

We have rolled out Custom Dashboards, introducing a fully interactive drag-and-drop layout builder. You can now design dashboards tailored to your network’s specific roles:

  • Interactive Grid: Drag, resize, and position widgets freely. The grid layout automatically snaps and scales across desktop and tablet views.
  • Templates Gallery: Get started quickly with pre-configured dashboard templates for Factions, Skyblock, Lobby metrics, or overall Network Health.
  • Composite Widgets: Combine related metrics (such as matching TPS lines with MSPT bars) into a single visual widget.
  • UX Enhancements: Added a fullscreen presentation mode, custom title fields for all cards, and auto-refresh intervals.

Player Version Distribution Timelines

Understanding which Minecraft client versions your players use is critical when deciding which legacy clients to support. We have added Player Version Distribution charts to the audience metrics dashboard:

  • Version Breakdown: Live pie charts and stacked timelines tracking connections by protocol version (e.g. 1.20.4, 1.20.1, 1.19.2).
  • Client Compatibility Tracking: Verify if dropping support for older client versions would impact your active player count.

Performance Log Management & Volume Histograms

We optimized the Logs Explorer to support high-volume networks without causing browser performance drops:

  • Virtualized Scrolling: The log stream now uses virtualized scrolling to render tens of thousands of rows smoothly.
  • Logs Volume Histogram: A new volume timeline chart allows you to quickly spot anomalies or volume spikes and click to zoom into specific timeframes.
  • Log Pagination & Caching: Rebuilt pagination queries to ensure lightning-fast page transitions when searching through past database events.

Ranks Analytics & Axis Redesign

The Ranks tab now includes Time-to-Rank analytics to measure player progression:

  • Time-to-Rank Timelines: Tracks the average playtime required for a player to progress between custom in-game ranks.
  • Responsive Charts: Rebuilt chart axes to render cleanly on mobile views, preventing label overlaps.

Dashboard-Level Alerts & Gauge Widgets

To help operators identify performance spikes at a glance, we introduced dashboard-specific alert visualizers:

  • Gauge Widget Warning Thresholds: Configure visual boundaries directly within custom dashboard gauges. If a metric crosses your threshold, the gauge turns red to indicate a warning.
  • Local Check Buttons: Instantly run local checks on specific metrics from your dashboard to verify current health.
  • Non-Triggering Scope: These alerts are visual indicators scoped to your browser session and dashboard layouts, serving as the visual groundwork for automated, server-wide alert rules.

Operational Settings & Plugin Version Warnings

We have added proactive monitoring settings to ensure your connector plugins stay updated and secure:

  • Version Warnings: The dashboard now displays a warning badge if any of your connected instances are running an outdated version of the ShardAnalytics plugin.
  • Logging Settings Toggle: Control telemetry verbosity level remotely from your dashboard to reduce database ingestion load.