Prerequisites for the Gatekeeper dashboards

Overview

Three things have to line up before you can open a dashboard and see results: the dashboards component must be installed, the application must have been analyzed and its results published, and your user profile must grant access. This page covers each in turn, then shows you how to open a dashboard.

Step 1 - Check the component is installed

The dashboards are provided by the optional dashboards component, which is only present in installation scenarios S1, S4 and S5. If your deployment was installed as S2 or S3, it has the Viewer but no dashboards, and the dashboard actions described below will not appear.

See CAST Imaging components for what the component does, and Choose your deployment for the scenario matrix.

Step 2 - Analyze the application and publish the results

A dashboard reads consolidated results, not the live analysis. That data arrives in two stages:

1. A snapshot is generated. A snapshot is a capture of the application’s source code at a point in time, measured against a set of rules. Snapshots are what the Engineering and Management dashboards are built from.
2. The snapshot is published. During analysis, the Publish to Management Dashboard job uploads the snapshot into the Measurement schema (general_measure), where results for all applications are consolidated. You can also publish existing snapshots afterwards using Publish All Snapshots on the Snapshots page.

Step 3 - Apply a license key

The dashboards are available with the appropriate CAST licenses only. CAST Imaging uses one of two license strategies, chosen when the installation is first initialized:

If an appropriate key is not in place, the dashboard actions are not available. See Manage license keys.

Step 4 - Check your permissions

Access to a dashboard is decided by your profile and the roles it contains. The dashboard actions are available when any of the following is true:

• You have the Administrator role, which grants access for all applications.
• You have the Application Owner role on the application.
• The application is assigned to a profile that includes any dashboard-related role.
• The application is assigned to two or more profiles and at least one of them includes a dashboard-related role.

The default profiles that grant result consumption in the dashboards are Admin, Application Creator, Application Architect, Application User and Application Guest. See Default profiles and roles for exactly what each one contains.

Roles that unlock actions inside a dashboard

Opening a dashboard and acting within it are governed separately. These three roles control the Engineering Dashboard’s editable features:

A user with Viewer Read Only can consult results but cannot edit any of these. See User permissions.

Step 5 - Open a dashboard

Open the application landing page and use the action for the dashboard you want: View Management Dashboard, View Engineering Dashboard or View Security Dashboard.

Why is the dashboard action missing or greyed out?

Read-only deployments

Where analysis runs on one installation and users consult results on another, the dashboards can be deployed in a read-only S4 (Dashboards only) configuration. In that case an administrator imports the result schemas and declares the applications before end users can reach them. See Standalone dashboard workflow.