Observability

Observability is one of the core components of Formant. It's important for developers and operators of autonomous machines to observe the state, status, or progress of an autonomous device and/or mission.

Observability is typically performed by observing the current or historical values of data streams. Formant provides dashboards to quickly and easily visualize the value of this data.

Views and Modules

There are two concepts within Formant's dashboards (often called the "Device View Page" inside Formant):

1. Views. An entire dashboard made up of modules in a specific layout.
2. Modules. A module is a small plugin or widget built for visualizing the value of one data stream or data point.

For example, in the dashboard, or Device View above, we are observing the current status of our Spot device, Walter. We can see the name of the view is "glitch.main" and we can currently see 9 Modules displayed on our View. Each module communicates one data value, such as video, device status, battery levels, etc.

Further reading

To learn more about views and modules, and how to add them to your Formant interface, see the Views and modules section of our Getting Started guide.