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Reading and customizing the SMS overview strip

Open Messages → SMS (/messages/sms). Below the page title, the overview strip condenses the channel into one scanning row: two circular ring indicators, two compact pills, and — when something is wrong — a failure-reason chip. Below the strip, the KPI cards (Total Outbound, Delivered, Delivery Rate, and friends) expand the same numbers over your active date range. This guide covers what each element measures, the windows they cover, and how to shrink the KPI row to only the cards you actually watch. Everything on this page is a tenant-owned read surface: it summarizes only your workspace’s traffic, and the customize control is per-operator — it never changes what anyone else on your team sees.

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What the Delivery ring shows

The first ring is the strip’s primary visual. It answers one question: of the sends that finished in the last 24 hours, how many were delivered?

• The percentage inside the ring is the delivery rate over the last 24 hours — Delivered ÷ (Delivered + Failed) for that window, drawn as the filled arc of the ring. The window label sits on the element itself, right beside the ring, so there is no guessing which range the number covers.
• Colour is tiered. Green at 95% and above, amber from 80% up to 95%, red below 80%. Those tiers are the inverse of the failure thresholds the Overall verdict uses, so the ring never reads healthier than the verdict beside it.
• No terminal outcome, no fake zero. When nothing reached a terminal state in the window (no delivered or failed sends yet), the ring renders empty with a – instead of a misleading 0.0%.

Delivery performance is deliberately separate from gateway availability: a gateway can be available and still deliver poorly, and the strip treats those as different facts. The ring owns delivery; the Overall pill owns availability.

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What the top-destinations ring shows

The second, smaller ring tracks where your outbound SMS goes rather than how well it lands:

• It displays the ISO country code of your top destination country over the trailing 30 days, with the filled arc showing that country’s share of your SMS outbound volume.
• Hover it for the ranked top three with percentages — for example US 61.4%, GB 22.0%, CA 9.8%.
• The split is built from your usage records’ per-country breakdown. Country codes only — it aggregates your own traffic and carries no supplier or routing detail.
• No outbound country data in the window flattens the ring to the empty – state; the ring shape always renders so the layout never shifts.

Use it as a drift check: if your traffic is supposed to be domestic and the ring suddenly shows a foreign top destination, that is worth a look at your recent sends before it is worth a look at your bill.

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Reading the pills: Response time and Overall

Two flat pills complete the strip. Response time reports the round-trip your most recent outbound SMS took to the delivery path, in milliseconds. Two facts to read it correctly:

1. It is a single most-recent-send measurement, not an average — there is no 24-hour smoothing behind it.
2. It expires five minutes after your last send. A “No data” reading after a quiet period means nothing has been sent recently, not that the path is slow.

Colour tiers: green up to 5 seconds, amber to 30 seconds, red beyond. Overall is the verdict pill — Operational, Degraded, or Down — with a pulsing dot. Gateway availability is folded into this pill rather than shown as a separate cell: the pill reads positive when sends flowed in the last 24 hours and no degradation is detected, caution when degraded, red when down, and muted when there is nothing to judge. While the first health check is in flight the strip shows a neutral “Checking gateway health…” state, and on a read failure it says “Gateway health unavailable” — it never shows an optimistic green on missing data.

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Diagnosing Degraded or Down: the failure-reason chip

When the Overall verdict is Degraded or Down, the strip tries to tell you why, not just that. If your real failures over the same 24-hour window share one dominant cause, a small chip appears next to the Overall pill carrying the human-readable reason — for example Insufficient balance or Sender not registered — in the same vocabulary the send dialog uses when it rejects a send. Hover the chip for the fuller explanation. The chip is evidence-based: it only appears when a dominant genuine failure can be named. Transient blips with no diagnosable cause leave the verdict unexplained rather than invent a reason, and a healthy Operational verdict never carries a chip. If no chip appears on a degraded reading, fall back to the KPI cards and the message list below the strip — filter to Failed and read the per-message error on the affected rows.

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Customizing the KPI cards

Beneath the strip, the KPI cards quantify the active date range: Total Outbound, Scheduled, Queued, Sent, Delivered, Submitted (no receipt), Failed, Expired, Other, Delivery Rate, and Avg Cost. All twelve show by default. The Customize overview button (the Settings-gear control beside Export, top right of the page) opens a checklist of exactly those twelve cards.

• Uncheck a card to hide it. The strip updates immediately — shrink it to just Delivered and Delivery Rate if that is all you monitor.
• The choice sticks. Your selection persists in this browser and survives navigation and reloads; if you run the SMS console in two tabs, toggling in one mirrors into the other.
• It is per-operator and per-browser. Hiding cards never changes the underlying data, the exports, or what a teammate sees on their own screen.
• Reset to default (all) at the bottom of the menu restores the full twelve.

Two reading hints for the cards themselves: Sent counts messages in transit (accepted by the network, not yet confirmed), so it is legitimately near zero on settled traffic — the running total lives on Total Outbound. Delivery Rate divides Delivered by completed messages (Delivered + Failed + Submitted (no receipt)), excluding sends still in transit, so it can differ from Delivered ÷ Total Outbound during a burst. Both cards carry an inline explanation to that effect.

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Take it further

• SMS channel guide — the full send/receive contract behind the numbers: senders, encoding, lifecycle statuses, and failure handling.
• Message-status webhooks — receive the same message.sent / message.delivered / message.failed transitions the strip counts, as push events on your own endpoint.
• Wire DLR webhooks per channel — subscribe per channel and verify the deliveries end to end.
• Messages hub orientation — where the SMS console sits among the other channel consoles.