Track overview: Dashboard Foundations

A Morning of Main Breaks. Welcome to the Dashboard Foundations track of ArcGIS Online Dashboard Essentials course. Picture this. It's seven in the morning, three water mains have broken overnight, and your phone won't stop ringing. Crews want to know where to go. Your manager wants a count of open breaks. The mayor's office wants to know how many customers are without water. What if all of them could open one link and see the answer on a live map with a few big numbers beside it? By the end of this track, you'll have built exactly that kind of screen yourself. This is the starting track of ArcGIS Online Dashboard Essentials.

Who This Track Is For. This track is for people who need to watch geographic data and share it on one screen. That could be a utility dispatcher, an emergency manager, a city analyst or an executive who just wants the numbers that matter. You'll need an ArcGIS Online account that's allowed to create and share content, which your organization's administrator can confirm. It helps if you've opened a web map before, but it isn't required. If you can use a spreadsheet and a web browser, you have everything you need to start.

Course 1: Why Dashboards and What Feeds Them. The first course is Data and Maps Ready for Dashboards. It opens with the big question: what is a dashboard for? You'll learn the three common kinds. Operational dashboards watch what's happening right now, like live outages. Tactical ones help supervisors spot patterns over days or weeks. Strategic ones show long-term trends for leaders. Then you'll meet the building blocks. A hosted feature layer is your data stored in ArcGIS Online, a bit like a shared table where every row also has a location. A web map displays those layers, and the dashboard reads from the web map.

Course 1: Getting the Data Right. Next, you'll prepare the data so the dashboard shows clean, readable results. An alias is a friendly display name, so a field called brk_stat shows as Break Status. A domain is a fixed list of allowed values, like a dropdown menu, so nobody types "opn" instead of Open. You'll set up the web map with clear symbols, useful pop-ups and the right layers turned on. You'll also create views, which are filtered windows onto one layer, so the public sees less than your crews. The course ends with a project: a water main break web map ready for a city operations dashboard.

Course 2: Your First Dashboard. The second course is Your First Dashboard. Here you'll create the dashboard itself, starting with the layout grid, a header and a theme. You'll add a map element, with a legend, a layer list and a basemap switcher. Then come indicators, the big numbers on a dashboard. An indicator can count open service requests, sum customers without power, or compare today's number to a reference value, such as yesterday's count. You'll also learn to arrange elements by stacking them, putting them in tabs or a sidebar, and resizing them so the screen stays readable.

Course 2: Share It and Build It. A dashboard nobody can find is not much use, so you'll save it properly and fill in the item details: a clear title, a summary and tags that help colleagues search for it. Then you'll share it with the right people, whether that's a team group or your whole organization. The course closes with a project you can show off: an incident monitoring dashboard with a live map and three indicators, the kind you'd use for traffic incidents or storm response. That's a real, working tool, not a practice screen.

How the Two Courses Build. Here's how it fits together. You start by deciding what the dashboard is for and who will read it. That choice shapes how you prepare the data. Clean data goes into a web map and, where needed, filtered views. Only then do you open the dashboard builder, lay out the screen, and add the map and indicators. Finally, you share it. Take this order seriously, because most dashboard problems start earlier than people think. A messy date field or a missing alias shows up as a confusing number on screen later.

Getting the Most From It. A few tips to make this worth your time. The lessons are short, so watch one and then try the same step in your own ArcGIS Online account right away. If you have real data from work, such as service requests or outage reports, use it. It sticks better than sample data. Please don't skip the two projects. They're where the separate pieces come together, and they're what you'll reuse on the job. And if a step feels fuzzy, go back and rewatch that part. There's no rush.

Recap and What's Next. Let's recap the Dashboard Foundations track of ArcGIS Online Dashboard Essentials. In Data and Maps Ready for Dashboards, you'll match a dashboard to its audience, prepare clean fields, build a web map and create filtered views, ending with a water main break map. In Your First Dashboard, you'll lay out a dashboard, add a map and indicators, and share it, ending with an incident monitoring dashboard. Up next is the very first lesson: what a dashboard actually does. Let's get started.