Admin console tour

The admin console is your war-room for the ExpressCharge fleet. This runbook walks a new operator through the dashboard and the sidebar so you know where to look when something needs attention — live sessions, an in-flight sync run, or a ChargeBox that’s gone offline.

Prerequisites

• An admin account on manage.polaris.express. Non-admins see a reduced sidebar (the System section and a few admin-only items are hidden).
• At least one ChargeBox registered in SteVe, or you’ll land on the first-run welcome banner instead of the dashboard.

Procedure

1. Sign in and land on the dashboard

   Sign in at manage.polaris.express. The root path renders the ExpressCharge dashboard — system pulse, live sessions, and fleet health on a single page.

   Screenshot pending

   ExpressCharge dashboard with header strip, KPI tiles, and 2×2 section grid

   If you’ve never registered a charger and have no sync runs yet, you’ll see a welcome banner instead of the dashboard tiles. Follow its Register an EV card link to start the onboarding flow.

2. Read the header strip

   The strip across the top of the dashboard is the system pulse. From left to right it shows:

   • Sync tier and the time of the next scheduled run.
   • An in-flight sync indicator when a run is currently executing.
   • Chargers online out of total.
   • Unread alerts count.

   Click the in-flight indicator to jump straight to the active run’s progress page.

3. Scan the KPI strip

   Below the header is the interactive stat strip. Each cell is a navigational shortcut:

   • kWh today — total energy delivered since midnight.
   • Active sessions — count of currently charging sessions.
   • Chargers online / offline.
   • Pending reservations.
   • Sync success (7d) — percent of sync runs that completed cleanly in the last seven days.

   Click any cell to drill into its source surface.

4. Use the four section cards

   The 2×2 grid below the KPI strip is the operator’s main view:

   • Live now (top-left, emerald) — currently active charging sessions, kept fresh over SSE. The card glows while sessions are present.
   • Active sync run / Sync schedule (top-right, blue) — when a sync run is in flight, this card shows live segment progress and glows. Otherwise it shows the current tier and next run.
   • Health (bottom-left, cyan) — operational warning rollups. Auto-revalidates every 30 seconds.
   • This week (bottom-right, cyan) — last 7-day rollups for kWh delivered, sync runs, EV cards activated, and reservations completed. Each tile carries the accent of its destination page.

   Card bodies scroll internally on lg+ viewports — the page itself is locked to the viewport so the dashboard never scrolls the whole window.

5. Learn the sidebar

   The sidebar groups every operator surface into four sections:

   • Devices — /admin/devices. Unified listing of chargers and scanners. Legacy /admin/chargers links 302-redirect here with ?type=charger.
   • Sessions — Charging Sessions (/transactions) and Reservations (/reservations).
   • Billing & Customers — Invoices (/invoices), Users (/users), and EV Cards (/tags).
   • System (admin-only) — Sync (/sync), Feature Flags (/admin/feature-flags), Notifications (/admin/notifications), and Webhook Events (/admin/webhook-events).

   Non-admin users don’t see the System section or any item marked admin-only.

6. Open the command palette

   Press ⌘K (or Ctrl+K on Windows/Linux) anywhere in the console to open the command palette. The Navigate group mirrors the sidebar and ranks recently-visited items first, so you can jump to any surface without touching the mouse.

Verify

You’re oriented correctly when:

• The dashboard renders with the header strip, KPI strip, and four section cards (not the welcome banner).
• The Live now card glows when at least one session is active.
• The Sync card glows and shows segment progress when a sync run is in flight.
• Clicking a sidebar item highlights it and loads the matching surface.
• ⌘K opens the palette and lists every nav item you can access.

If something goes wrong

Caution

You see the welcome banner instead of the dashboard. This means the system sees zero chargers ever registered AND zero sync runs on record. Register a ChargeBox in SteVe, then return here. The banner clears automatically once either condition is no longer true.

Caution

The System section is missing from the sidebar. Your account isn’t an admin. Ask another admin to elevate you via the Users surface.

Caution

A sidebar item doesn’t highlight on its own page. The admin host rewrites clean URLs (/sync) to /admin/sync server-side. Active-state matching handles both shapes, so if highlighting is wrong it’s a bug — capture the URL and report it rather than working around it.

Caution

The Live now or Sync card never updates. Both cards rely on SSE. If your network blocks long-lived connections, the cards fall back to the last SSR snapshot and won’t refresh until you reload. Check your proxy or VPN.

Audit and reversibility

The console tour itself is read-only — viewing the dashboard logs nothing destructive. Any action you take from the dashboard (clicking into a session, kicking off a sync, archiving a notification) is audited on its own surface. See the relevant runbook for that action’s audit trail.

Related

• Register a ChargeBox in SteVe
• Trigger a manual sync run
• Link an EV card to a Lago customer
• Glossary