A view in the Monitoring Dashboard displays one or more charts that contain runtime MBean attributes with numeric or Boolean values that are useful to measure, either as their current values or as their changes over time. These values, referred to in the Monitoring Dashboard as metrics, originate from either of the following sources:

• Active runtime MBean instances, which are polled at each sampling interval. These are called polled metrics.
• The Archive, which holds collected metrics. Collected metrics are those gathered by the Harvester, which must have been previously configured as described in Configuring the Harvester for Metric Collection. Collected metrics are useful for examining historical metrics gathered during a specific time range that has already passed.

Note that an individual metric is scoped to only a single server.

Charts can show either the current time range values of active runtime MBean instances, or values from an earlier time range. Current time range charts work with all metric types (that is, you don't have to have first gathered collected metrics in the Archive), but charts that display collected metrics need to be configured with a custom time range. To configure a custom time range for a chart, see Set individual chart properties. For more information, see About Metrics and Chart Types.

When working with charts, the main tasks you perform include the following: