At Samsara, our Industrial product group is focused on building simple, intuitive tools that help you prevent downtime and reduce maintenance costs across your industrial assets. We believe that our technology should be easy to manage and fit seamlessly into your operations. That’s why, for the past few months, we’ve been working side-by-side with our customers and partners to reimagine the industrial configuration process.

Today, we’re excited to announce the result: an all-new configuration experience centered around three key principles:

1. Intuitive design: The configuration workflow should be centralized, clear, and easy to follow for every user.

2. Asset-centric: The industrial platform should revolve around our customers’ assets.

3. Highly scalable: It should be quick and easy to set up a consistent view of common assets across large-scale deployments. 

Read on to learn how these principles play out on our redesigned configuration page and what it means for your organization.

Designed for ease of use

A Streamlined Navigation Panel

Our first priority in rethinking the configuration process was to provide a simplified experience for our customers. That’s why we’ve completely refreshed the vertical navigation panel on the left-hand side of the new configuration page. From setting up gateways to creating dashboards, this new panel allows you to complete every step in the configuration process without ever leaving the page. You’ll also find that it is divided into five sections–we’ve deliberately organized these sections so that they logically follow one another. By working from top to bottom, you’ll hit every important step in the configuration process.

Easy to Search I/O

One of the most common requests from our customers and partners has been to have more power to sort through and manage their asset I/Os. With that in mind, we’ve added the ability to sort I/Os by asset, gateway, or third-party device. This new addition will help you drill down to a specific I/O in seconds, whether you’re managing 10 or 10,000 assets.

We also know that some of our customers like to view sparklines alongside their I/O, while others prefer to maximize the number of I/O they can view on a single screen. That’s why we’re providing added flexibility to hide or show information on the I/O page. With this new feature, customers can choose to show or hide columns for assets, data sources, last reported values, graphs, and last reported data point when searching their I/O. 

Gateway Troubleshooting Tools

In addition to our streamlined UI and improved searchability, we’ve added a few new tools to help you quickly troubleshoot hardware installation issues without going on site. Click into any Gateway in the Gateway section, and you’ll find a new summary page that includes more connectivity details including the device’s ethernet MAC address and current cellular operator. Navigate over to the settings tab and you’ll also find a new ping tool to help you confirm connectivity to any 3rd party device on your network in seconds.

Asset-centric

We know that effective asset and equipment management is central to our customers’ efforts to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and deliver outstanding service. That’s why assets are at the heart of the Samsara Industrial home page, and it’s why we’ve added a brand new assets section to the new configuration page. Now, every data input, dashboard, alarm, and piece of metadata that you’ve associated with your asset is just a click or two away. 

And using the Asset Tree editor, you can quickly customize your asset navigation structure to match your operational workflows. Depending on your organization and how you plan to use the Samsara dashboard, this may mean that you choose to group by asset type, by region, or by job. We’ve also added two new features that allow you to make changes across multiple assets all at once–CSV import and bulk edit mode. 

Highly Scalable

When we sat down with some of our largest customers to reimagine their configuration experience, we noticed one consistent trend: they were spending far too much time recreating the same dashboards across highly similar assets. That’s why we’re excited to release dashboard templates alongside the new configuration page. 

Dashboard templates allow you to clone dashboards across multiple assets in just a few clicks. This is enabled by two new components. The first is the data group which groups similar I/O and serves as the basic building block of a dashboard template, much like I/O in standard dashboards. The second is the asset label, which allows you to group and apply templates across similar assets. To learn more about how dashboard templates, data groups, and asset labels work, check out this blog post.

Try it for Yourself

While these enhancements will make first-time configuration a much more intuitive and efficient process, it will also streamline ongoing management and allow our existing customers to easily make configuration updates as their organizations grow. The all new configuration page is available starting today for Samsara Industrial customers. 

If you’re not yet a Samsara customer but you’re ready for a new asset monitoring and management experience, please get in touch for a free trial!