Interface Guide

A quick reference for what the uControl Insight web UI looks like and how to navigate it. Aimed at day-to-day operators and administrators rather than developers.

Theme: light, dark, or follow your OS

Every user picks their own appearance preference. The choice is saved to your profile and follows you across browsers and devices — sign in on a new laptop and the UI paints in your chosen theme immediately.

Switch theme

Two ways:

1. Sidebar toggle — click the ☾ / ☀ button in the bottom-left of the sidebar. The UI flips immediately and the choice is saved.

2. Profile → Appearance — open Profile (sidebar footer) and choose:

   Option	Behaviour
   Light	Warm cream surfaces. Best for daylight / projector.
   Dark	Deep ink surfaces. Easier on the eyes in dim rooms, NOC dashboards, on-call sessions.
   Match system	No override stored — uControl follows your operating system's prefers-color-scheme.

You can also toggle from the login page; the choice is held locally until you sign in, then syncs to your profile.

Language: your own interface language

The uControl Insight interface is available in five languages — English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. Each user chooses their own language on their Profile page; until they do, the platform uses the global default set under Settings → General. Like your theme, the choice is saved to your profile and follows you across browsers and devices.

Dates and numbers follow each user's locale — for example, English shows 31 Aug 2026 and German shows 31.08.2026.

Drill-through tiles

The Home page and Inventory Dashboard present asset counts as clickable tiles. Click any tile to jump to the filtered asset list.

Lifecycle states (top tiles)

Hover any tile and an amber accent underline grows in from the left — that's your cue the tile is navigable.

Asset breakdown by type

Each row in the Asset breakdown by type list on the Inventory Dashboard is a full-width clickable link. Clicking takes you to /assets pre-filtered by category or type — so "Hosts" opens hosts only, "Cloud Databases" opens RDS / managed-DB assets only, etc. Zero-count rows are hidden to keep the list scannable.

AI features at a glance

Anywhere you see the amber ◆ mark, you're looking at an AI-assisted feature. The mark replaces the old purple sparkle and is used consistently across:

• Ask uControl — natural-language chat assistant. Avatar bubbles, markdown answers (tables, lists, code blocks), suggestion chips on the empty state.

• Smart search on the Assets page — natural-language filter that's translated into an asset search.

• AI Diagnosis on failed discovery runs.

• AI Insights narration + Daily Digest.

• Risk Dashboard explanations.

• New flow peers card on the asset detail (flow-anomaly narration).

All AI features can be toggled globally in Settings → AI by users with the Administrator role.

Status badges

Run / job / health status is shown as a coloured pill rather than plain text:

Colours are derived from the design tokens so they re-tint correctly in both themes.

Keyboard, accessibility & navigation aids

• Skip to content — press Tab as soon as a page loads; the first focus stop is a Skip to content link that jumps past the sidebar.

• Esc closes any open dialog.

• Click outside a dialog closes it.

• Tab / Shift+Tab inside a dialog cycles only inside it (focus is trapped while the dialog is open).

• Closing a dialog returns focus to whatever opened it.

• Animations are suppressed when your OS has Reduce motion enabled.

Footer indicators

Where the password change went (SSO users)

If you signed in via SAML or OpenID Connect (e.g. ADFS, Azure AD, Keycloak), the Profile → Change Password card is replaced with a Managed by your SSO provider note. Local password changes for federated users would have no effect — change your password directly with your identity provider instead. Local-auth users continue to see the full password form.

Interfaces tab

The Interfaces tab on an asset detail page shows every network interface observed on that asset — NICs for hosts (physical, virtual, hypervisors) and physical ports for switches / routers. The tab is hidden on categories where it would always be empty (cloud accounts, software CIs, datastores).

Interfaces use the same upsert + age lifecycle as installed software and discovered services: keyed by (asset_id, if_name), with first_seen_at preserved across re-scans so you can answer "when was this NIC first attached?" or "this port has been here continuously since…". Interfaces not observed for 30 days are pruned by the daily retention sweeper.