Dashboards
Dashboards bring mechanism and chain metrics into configurable visual layouts — giving you a live view of whether governance is working, not just whether it has been documented.
Dashboards in Mechanic visualise metric data from mechanisms and chains. They are not reporting tools in the traditional sense — they are operational views designed to answer whether governance is working in practice, not whether it has been written down.
Creating a dashboard
From the Mechanic home page, navigate to Dashboards and select New dashboard. Give it a name that describes its scope: "AI Risk Governance — Live View", "Incident Management Metrics", or similar.
An empty dashboard opens. Add widgets from the widget library to build your view.
Widgets
Each widget visualises a specific metric or set of metrics. The available widget types include:
- Line chart — time-series view of a metric over a defined period. Useful for trends: is this metric improving, degrading, or stable?
- Bar chart — comparison across categories or time intervals.
- Gauge — a single metric displayed against its target value. Good for at-a-glance status: are we above or below threshold?
- Single value — the latest value of a metric, with optional trend indicator.
- Mechanism summary — a roll-up of a mechanism's component health, useful for dashboard overviews.
Widgets are added via the widget panel and can be resized and repositioned within the dashboard grid.
Connecting widgets to metrics
When configuring a widget, you select the mechanism (or chain) and the specific metric you want to display. Metrics must be defined on the mechanism before they can be visualised — see Building a mechanism for how to add metrics, and Metrics & integrations for how data gets into those metrics.
A widget with no data shows a clear empty state rather than misleading zeros. This matters: a metric that has never received data should not be confused with a metric that is consistently reading zero.
Dashboard scope
A single dashboard can pull metrics from multiple mechanisms and chains. This makes cross-mechanism dashboards possible — a view of your full incident governance programme, for example, that surfaces metrics from detection, response, investigation, and notification mechanisms in one place.
What next?
- Metrics & integrations — how metric data is ingested into Balcony via API, manual entry, and CSV upload.
- Chains — how chains group mechanisms and carry chain-level metrics.