The Hierarchy and the Dashboard

When using the dashboard feature, the hierarchy must be balanced. That is, every leaf node in the hierarchy must be at the same depth. The following figures illustrate the difference between a balanced and an unbalanced hierarchy:

The blue hierarchy is balanced: only the nodes at level 3 have no children. The red hierarchy is unbalanced: there are nodes at both level 2 and level 3 that have no children.

All the users assigned to a given node in the hierarchy share the same dashboard configuration. This configuration specifies how Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are calculated for the dashboard. By default, every node in the hierarchy inherits the configuration of its parent node. This inheritance makes it easy to change the configuration of the dashboard for all users in an organization by changing the configuration of the root node in the hierarchy.

Individual nodes can override the inherited configuration by specifying a different criterion for a KPI, regardless of the configuration of its parent node. That new KPI setting is then inherited by all child nodes, unless they, in turn, override the setting.

Just as nodes in the hierarchy can inherit the dashboard configuration of the parent node, all the vehicles that belong to a node inherit the dashboard configuration of the associated node. You can override individual configuration settings on vehicles just as you can for nodes.