Setting up a welcome page
A welcome page is a default dashboard within a default app tailored to a specific role or user group that presents users with all the resources they need to get Splunking. A welcome page is a good way to focus users' attention on workflows that are relevant to them. You can create your own welcome pages or use the Welcome Page Creator app on Splunkbase to help you quickly implement welcome pages that accelerate your users' time to effectiveness.
Guidelines for creating welcome pages
Use the Welcome Page Creator app from Splunkbase
The Welcome Page Creator for Splunk provides example dashboards, template workspaces, and more than 20 prebuilt panels to get your welcome page started.
Keep it simple
Keep content minimal and focused on relevant tasks and information. Less content makes it easier for users to focus on what is important so they can use the platform more effectively.
Consider the audience
The focus and communication style of your developers is dramatically different than that of your business users. For this reason, some of the panels in the Welcome Page Creator have similar content, but present it differently. Keep this in mind when selecting what panels to include on a welcome page. Use materials and language that is effective for the reader.
Tailor welcome pages to different roles
Assign a unique role to each work group so you can segregate their workspaces and provide the most effective welcome page for each team. You can also change the permissions on other team's workspaces so users only see their own workspace, and not workspaces that belong to other groups. For more about assigning access to apps for specific roles, see Restricting access to specific apps.
Listen to questions from your users
After implementing welcome pages, users will still have questions. Put answers to repeated questions in a new panel on your welcome page. When necessary, edit any shared prebuilt panel or convert any panel to an inline panel so you can further customize it for that audience. For more about working with dashboard panels, see Add panels to dashboards.
Reuse content with prebuilt panels and cloning knowledge objects
Prebuilt panels enable you to share content across dashboards. The Welcome Page Creator comes with many prebuilt panels, and you can also make your own to create welcome pages for different teams. For more about using prebuilt panels, see Add prebuilt panels to a dashboard.
Cloning knowledge objects is another way to share content with different teams and audiences. For more about cloning knowledge objects, see Moving or cloning a knowledge object.
Leverage saved searches
The welcome page will be the default screen presented to a user when the Splunk platform first opens. Dashboard content leveraging Splunk search will run each time this page loads. If SPL search is used, consider leveraging saved searches in the default dashboard to minimize: load times, duplicate searches, SVC processing loads, and concurrent search limit impact.
Guidelines for creating a welcome page from scratch
Here are the high-level steps to create a welcome page from scratch. As an alternative, you can use the instructions on the Welcome Page Creator for Splunk's Splunkbase page to accelerate this process.
- Identify a role or group that is the target audience for the welcome page.
- Identify the needs and objectives of that role or group, and design content that will meet those needs and answer their questions.
- Create a welcome page.
- Populate the dashboard with content that answers those common questions from the users. For more about creating a dashboard, see Create dashboards and panels. If SPL search is used, consider leveraging saved searches to reduce processing and load times.
- Set the role or group's default app.
- Ideally, this would be an app tailored for that role or team. For more about default apps and how to provision them for certain user roles, see Configure Splunk Web to open directly to an app. For more about apps as team workspaces, see Building user group workspaces.
- Set the default app's default dashboard to your welcome page.
- For more about default dashboards, see Add navigation to a Splunk app.
- Validate your welcome page.
- Ask a member of the target team or role to log in and discover features using your welcome dashboard.