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Welcome to the Fleet Dashboard Manual

The Fleet Dashboard is the companion container to the NMEA GPS Simulator. It aggregates per-simulator position telemetry and heartbeats from many rebroadcasters into a single screen, with click-through to Google Maps for any online aircraft and an optional health view that distinguishes "emulator is down" from "the simulator behind the emulator is unreachable."

This manual is organized per-feature, just like the simulator manual. If you've already read User Manual (Simulator), the format will be familiar.

How this manual is organized

Section When to read it
Overview Layout orientation - header, theme toggle, health toggle, the grid of simulator cards.
Simulator Card Per-card reference - every field shown, when it's populated, what each color means.
Health Chain The four-node diagnostic chain that appears when you toggle the health view on.
Configuration Env vars (SIM_N_NAME, SIM_N_PORT, SIM_N_GPS_SYSTEM), compose-file setup, and how to wire emulators to the dashboard.
Appendix Troubleshooting, glossary, env-var reference for the dashboard side.

How the dashboard fits with the simulator

The dashboard is read-only with respect to each simulator - it watches UDP traffic that the simulator's Rebroadcaster Mode is already producing. It does not push anything back. So the operator-facing workflow is:

  1. Each simulator container runs in Rebroadcaster Mode with UDP Retransmit enabled, targeting the dashboard's IP and a per-simulator port.
  2. The dashboard container is configured (via env vars) with the matching list of SIM_N_NAME / SIM_N_PORT entries.
  3. Each simulator additionally sets SIMULATOR_IP so the rebroadcaster can ping the upstream sim host and report sim_reachable in the heartbeat.
  4. The dashboard renders one card per configured simulator and updates it whenever a packet arrives.

See Fleet Monitoring for the end-to-end setup walkthrough.

When you get stuck

Symptom Where to look
Card stays gray after the emulator is configured Configuration and Fleet Monitoring
Card is green but the position values look wrong Check the rebroadcaster's UDP retransmit target IP and port match SIM_N_PORT.
Health view shows red on the GPS chain segment Health Chain walks through what each failed segment means.
tcpdump shows packets at the dashboard host but no card updates Dashboard port mapping. The dashboard uses network_mode: host, so the listener binds host ports directly - confirm there's no host firewall and the env vars list the right ports.

What's next