The Jenkins Dashboard

The dashboard is your home screen: it lists jobs, shows build status, and gives access to management settings.

After logging in you land on the dashboard. This is where you create and monitor everything.

Key areas

  • Job list — every job/pipeline with a colored status ball (blue = success, red = failed, grey = not built).
  • New Item — create a new job or pipeline.
  • Build Queue — jobs waiting for a free executor.
  • Build Executor Status — shows which agents are busy right now.
  • Manage Jenkins — global configuration, plugins, credentials, users, and nodes.

Weather icons

Jenkins shows a little weather icon per job summarizing recent build health — sunny means the last builds mostly passed, stormy means they mostly failed.

Example

Example · bash
# You will spend most of your time in two places:
#
#  Dashboard         -> create jobs, watch builds
#  Manage Jenkins    -> configure the server
#
# Manage Jenkins > System         : global settings
# Manage Jenkins > Plugins        : install/update plugins
# Manage Jenkins > Credentials    : store secrets
# Manage Jenkins > Nodes          : manage agents

When to use it

  • A release manager scans the dashboard build history each morning to verify overnight scheduled jobs succeeded.
  • A DevOps lead creates a custom view on the dashboard to show only production-deploy pipelines to stakeholders.
  • A developer watches the progress of their pipeline run directly from the dashboard without opening individual job pages.

More examples

Query job list via REST API

Fetches the dashboard job list with names and status colours as JSON using the Jenkins REST API.

Example · bash
curl -s \
  'http://localhost:8080/api/json?tree=jobs[name,color]' \
  --user admin:$TOKEN \
  | python3 -m json.tool

Run a job and wait via CLI

Triggers a job via the Jenkins CLI and waits for completion, returning a non-zero exit code on failure.

Example · bash
java -jar jenkins-cli.jar \
  -s http://localhost:8080 \
  -auth admin:$TOKEN \
  build my-pipeline --wait
echo "Build exited with: $?"

Create a dashboard list view

Creates a filtered dashboard list view named Production via the Jenkins REST API.

Example · bash
curl -X POST \
  'http://localhost:8080/createView?name=Production' \
  --user admin:$TOKEN \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{"name":"Production","mode":"hudson.model.ListView"}'

Related

jenkins freestyle job

Discussion

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