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Reading your dashboard

Your dashboard shows the paths you measure — each link and target against its own history. This is what every panel is telling you, and how to read a problem when one appears.

What you are looking at

The dashboard shows your links only — the site-to-site paths and targets measured from your own probes. Everything is judged against its own baseline, not a fixed number: we learn what normal looks like for each link, and colour the departure from it.

The colour scale

The same bands colour every panel — latency added over the link's trended norm:

The panels

Links overview

Every link and target you measure, each carrying its current reading against baseline. This is the first place to look: anything off-normal is coloured, so a healthy network is a quiet one. Select a link to open the detail below.

Hop by hop

The path a link actually takes, hop by hop, with the network on either side of each handoff named. When a link degrades, this is where you see the first handoff at which conditions changed — the boundary where the problem begins, and which network owns the stretch past it. That is the difference between “something is slow” and “the slowdown starts where we hand off to carrier X.”

Latency against baseline

Round-trip time over the day, drawn against the link's learned normal. A flat trace sitting on its baseline is a healthy circuit; a step up that holds is a reroute onto a worse path; a spike that returns is transient. The baseline itself is shown, so you are always reading the gap, not a bare number.

Packet loss and jitter

Loss and jitter hour by hour. Loss is the share of probes that never came back; jitter is how much the round-trip time varies from one probe to the next. A link can hold its average latency and still be unusable if loss or jitter climbs — these panels catch that.

Voice quality

For paths that carry real-time traffic, a voice-quality read derived from latency, loss and jitter together — a single indicator of whether a call over that path would sound clean. Useful for links between offices, or to a SIP or conferencing provider.

Route changes and DNS drift

Route changes flag when the path itself moved — a different set of hops than the link normally takes, which often explains a latency step before anything else does. DNS drift flags when a name you depend on starts resolving somewhere new, which can quietly send your traffic down a different path.

Availability and history

Whether each link was answering, kept over time, so you can show that a circuit was down from 02:14 to 02:51 last Tuesday rather than reconstruct it from memory. History is retained, so yesterday's incident is still there this morning.

Reading a problem

When a link colours, read it top down:

1. How bad, and since when — the reading against baseline and the start time.
2. Where it starts — the first handoff on the hop-by-hop where conditions changed.
3. Who owns that stretch — the network named on the far side of that handoff.
4. Is it just you — whether the same network is showing the same trouble on other paths, which separates “our circuit” from “that carrier, everywhere.”

When a reading is unknown

A link we have not measured enough yet, or a destination that has never answered, is shown as unknown — never as a fault, and never as healthy. SquidGrid does not fill a gap with a guess. An empty panel means we do not have the data yet, and it will fill as measurement accumulates.

Arranging it yourself

The dashboard is yours to arrange — put the links you care about most where you want them, and size the panels to the way your team watches. The arrangement is saved to your account.

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