Live dashboard

Status: Accepted · Audience: Operator · Area: B — Running it

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Purpose

One screen that answers “what is my stack doing right now?”

Without it, the answer requires opening six web UIs: SABnzbd for Usenet progress, qBittorrent for torrents, Sonarr for the queue, Gluetun’s logs for VPN state, and a terminal for disk usage. Each holds one fragment; nobody holds the whole picture.

The dashboard’s value is precisely the fragments no single service can provide — that qBittorrent’s traffic is genuinely leaving via the tunnel, that imports are hardlinking rather than copying, that the disk will fill before the queue drains.

Behaviour

It opens by default

Running lemonfiber with configuration present and no subcommand opens the dashboard. It is the product’s front door for the operator.

Content, in priority order

Ordered by what the operator needs to see first, not by what’s easiest to render:

Section	Shows
Health summary	One line: everything fine, or n things need attention (G7)
VPN	Tunnel state, exit IP and country, forwarded port, and whether the download client’s egress matches
Transfers	Active downloads with name, protocol, progress, speed, ETA
Queue	Per-*arr queue depth, plus anything stuck (C7)
Storage	Free space, projected exhaustion, hardlink status
Services	Per-service state, grouped by profile

The VPN row is placed second, above transfers, deliberately: it is the only item on the screen with consequences outside the machine.

It refreshes without blocking

The view updates about once a second. Input remains responsive during image pulls, log streaming and slow API calls. A dashboard that freezes while polling is worse than a static status command.

It degrades honestly

If live telemetry is unavailable — the Docker API unreachable while the CLI still works, or an *arr not responding — the affected panel says so explicitly rather than showing stale data as current or blank data as zero.

Stale, unknown, and zero are three different things and must never be rendered identically. “0 B/s” and “unknown” mean opposite things to someone deciding whether their download is stuck.

It shows figures no service knows

• Egress comparison — the download client’s public IP against the VPN’s
• Hardlink status — whether imports are linking or copying
• Projected disk exhaustion — free space against queued content size
• Cross-service stalls — downloaded but never imported

Panels are addressable

The operator can view any panel alone, for a narrow terminal or a focused question.

States

State	Meaning
live	Telemetry current, refreshing normally
degraded	Some sources unavailable; affected panels marked
disconnected	Docker API unreachable; control may still work via the CLI path
no-stack	Configured but nothing running; offers to start a form
unconfigured	No configuration; offers setup

Edge cases

Situation	Behaviour
Docker API unavailable, CLI path working	Enter disconnected, state that telemetry is off but control still works. Don’t exit.
A service’s API unreachable	Mark that panel unavailable; leave the rest live. One failure must not blank the screen.
Terminal too narrow	Degrade gracefully: drop columns by priority, never truncate mid-value or corrupt the layout.
Terminal resized	Reflow without restarting or losing scroll position.
No downloads active	Say “no active transfers”, not an empty box. Absence of data is information.
Very large queue	Show the top n by relevance with a total count. Never attempt to render thousands of rows.
VPN not configured	Omit the VPN panel entirely rather than showing a permanently red one.
Native-mode Jellyfin	Show it, marked host-managed, with health if reachable.
Data unchanged between refreshes	Don’t redraw unnecessarily; avoid flicker.
Very long service or release names	Truncate with an unambiguous marker; full value available on focus.
Running over SSH on a slow link	Reduce refresh rate rather than saturating the connection.
Clock skew between host and containers	Compute durations from a single clock source; never render a negative ETA.

Acceptance criteria

ID	Requirement
B3-R1	Invoking lemonfiber with configuration present and no subcommand MUST open the dashboard.
B3-R2	The dashboard MUST show health summary, VPN state, transfers, queue depth, storage and service states.
B3-R3	VPN state MUST include exit IP, country, forwarded port, and egress-match confirmation.
B3-R4	Refresh MUST NOT block user input.
B3-R5	Stale, unknown and zero values MUST be visually distinct.
B3-R6	An unavailable data source MUST mark only its own panel, leaving others live.
B3-R7	Loss of the telemetry channel MUST NOT terminate the dashboard, and MUST be stated.
B3-R8	The dashboard MUST show hardlink status and projected disk exhaustion.
B3-R9	Narrow terminals MUST degrade by dropping lower-priority columns, never by corrupting layout.
B3-R10	Resizing MUST reflow without restart or loss of scroll position.
B3-R11	Absent data MUST be stated explicitly rather than rendered as an empty region.
B3-R12	Large collections MUST be truncated with a total count shown.
B3-R13	Any panel MUST be viewable in isolation.
B3-R14	Idle refresh MUST sustain 1 Hz below 2% CPU, and lemonfiber’s resident memory SHOULD stay under 50 MB.
B3-R15	Durations and ETAs MUST derive from one clock source and MUST never render negative.

Related

• B2 Lifecycle — the state being displayed
• B4 Log viewing — drilling into a specific service
• C2 VPN verification — the egress comparison
• G1 Interface tiers — TUI and web rendering
• G7 Health summary