Subjects.

Subjects are the main assets you want to monitor. This can be a machine, office or production line. For example, your bottle filing line and your packaging line are each a subject. Subjects can either be shown in a list or on a map. The color of the map marker indicates the status of the subject to give you an instant view on the health of the subjects.

Using subjects

The state of your subject is of great importance in order to know if you should take action. The subject dashboard gives you all the ins and outs at glance. The properties (1) show the details of the subject and the Event Triggers statuses (2) underneath display the latest event per trigger. The second part of the screen (3) shows the metrics with filter options. Each metric comes with some stats (4) to instantly determine your metric health. Adjusting the subject can easily be done via the settings (5) on the top-right corner of the page.

Managing subject types

Subject types can be seen as a template or blueprint for a subject. This makes it easy to add and adjust subjects of the same type.

Creating subject types

Creating a subject type is done by providing a name for the type and adding a default set of properties and metrics. Go to the subject type overview page when you want to add a new type:

The first screen after hitting the green plus sign is only there to provide a name for the type.

Enter a name and move on to configuring properties and metrics by hitting Create subject type.

Configure properties

The next task is to decide whether you want to assign properties to the subject type. Properties are optional and meant to provide extra information (metadata) about the subject and they can also be used as filters. For example, when you want to compare certain series with a specific property.

Attribute	Description
Name	Open the dropdown and select the property you want assign. Nothing to choose from? You have to create properties in the project settings.
Subject must define a value	Check the checkbox when a value of for this property is required for every subject you add.
Hide from subject dashboard	Check the checkbox the property should not be shown in the subject dashboard.

Configure metrics

Last but not least, it’s time to determine which metrics you want to add to the subject type. We created the metrics documentation to explain the three different types and their capabilities.

Managing subjects

The platform provides several actions on subjects. Down here you can find the most common actions explained.

Creating subjects

Creating a subject means adding a subject of a specific type to your project. First of all, you have to navigate to the subject overview:

Next is to add a subject and at least fill in the required fields.

Attribute	Description
Type	The subject type you want to create a subject for. Nothing to choose from? You have to scroll up to see how to create a subject type.
Name	Give your subject a descriptive name so you can easily recognize and find it.
External ID	Provide the ID the subject has in your own systems. In this way you can easily map subjects to the entities they relate to in your own systems. This external ID is also used to construct the default ingestion IDs you have to provide when sending measurements for ingested metrics.
Properties	Define values for the properties that are assigned to this subject’s type. Look-up the properties docs to see how to add properties to subject types
Metrics	Use the default ingestion IDs or provide your custom one for your ingested metrics. You can also override these with custom ones. You have to provide an ingestion IDs when sending measurements.

Here you can see a Blockbaxer creating a subject:

Editing and deleting subjects

Deleting subjects is like drinking beer on a Friday night: it’s an easy exercise but the consequences can be huge. Why? Deleting a subject will also remove the associated metrics with their measurements and events. This means you can delete a lot of data by a simply deleting a subject, so be careful. Anyway, this is where you can edit and delete: