netbox-community
Colour code dot on notification bell
NetBox version
v4.4.7
Feature type
Change to existing functionality
Proposed functionality
It would be helpful to colour code the dot for new notifications next to the notification bell in the upper right corner:
- green dot: all notifications are success messages,
- red dot: at least one notification is a failure message.
Use case
In everyday use it's important to tell success notifications from failure notifications. Right now, all new notifications are indicated by a red dot to the upper right of the notification bell. Red in general indicates some sort of problem. However, the dot is also red if there're just success messages present. Colour coding the dot would help to quickly assess whether failure notifications are present or not. Especially if there're many background jobs with regular notifications, success messages don't necessarily force you to check the notifications.
Database changes
Likely not necessary.
External dependencies
N/A.
Typically the logic I see would be:
green = all unread notifications are green yellow = SOME unread notifications are not green, (but some are green) red = ALL unread notifications are not green, (none are green)
While I can appreciate the use case, I suspect it will deliver little value in practice. I can't even think of any other applications that do something similar with a notification bell. There's also an accessibility consideration here: A tiny colored dot is not very significant, particularly to the color-deficient.
@jeremystretch We have a very similar colour coding in monitoring system notifications e.g. in LibreNMS where there's a very similar system of colour coding alerts. LibreNMS's alert system has at least three different severities which are colour coded green, orange and red. In our organisation we find it very helpful to be able to deduce from the colour of the notification symbol in the dashboard whether any "orange" or even "red" alerts are present. I understand your argument regarding colour deficient users but that holds true for almost any monitoring system's colour coding in dashboards. In our current case it wouldn't take anything away for colour deficient users since a "new notification" symbol would still be there but it would add a bit of comfort for all other users.
@rconkor I'd colour code the following way:
- green: all notifications are green,
- orange: at least one notification is orange but none is red,
- red: at least one is red.
This seems to be the way most other software (e.g. LibreNMS) handles it.