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A DBA, an SRE, and an engineer should not share a sidebar

Pick a workspace role, hide pages you never open, pin the ones you do — the sidebar follows this browser, not the whole team.

August 19, 2026

chmonitor has more pages than any one person opens. A DBA lives in tables, merges, and keeper. An engineer lives in queries and the SQL console. An SRE lives in health, metrics, and logs. Same product. Different noise.

Settings → Workspace → Navigation is the switch. The header says it: local to this browser. It slims the sidebar and the command palette for you. It does not change the server, and it does not change anyone else.

Pick a role

Five presets. Named roles keep a stable set of top-level groups. Full is the only one that auto-expands: new pages stay visible.

Role Groups you keep
Full Every page the host and deployment already allow
DBA Overview, Tools, Queries, Tables, Merges, Metrics, Keeper, Security, Logs, Cluster, System
Engineer Overview, Tools, Queries, Tables, Insights, AI Agent
SRE Overview, Tools, Health, Insights, Queries, Tables, System, Operations, Metrics, Logs
Custom Start from a role, then hide extra pages

Pick a role and the Settings tree remounts collapsed, so you can scan groups instead of a wall of checkboxes. Expand only what you care about. Search filters the tree.

The pill flips to Custom only when Hide/Show on a leaf diverges from that role’s hide list. Collapsing a parent does not count.

Hide a page in Settings

Leaves have Hide / Show. Hidden rows stay in the tree, dimmed. Parent rows are chevron-only — not hideable.

Footer About is not in this list. It sits next to the Settings gear and the host switcher, and those three are never filtered.

Hidden is not unauthorized. Routes stay reachable by URL. Restore always lives here: Settings → Workspace → Navigation.

A separate toggle on the same tab covers pages whose system table is missing on this host (dim them, or drop them from the menu). That is not your hide list.

Hide from the sidebar

Hover a leaf. Hide sits next to Pin. A toast says the page is hidden, with Undo and Open Navigation. The first one stays up longer so you see the restore path.

Pin and reorder

Pin a page and it lands in Favorites at the top of the sidebar. Drag the grip to reorder. Pins are local to this browser too. Unpin from the same hover control.

Chrome vs the menu

Theme, units, and layout stay on the Appearance / Units / Layout tabs — local chrome. The role plus hide list is the information architecture: which groups exist, which leaves you see.

Workspace visibility is applied last. Permission, cloud, and engine gates still win. Switch to a Postgres host and the Navigation tree matches that sidebar.

The Tools menu

Interactive work — run SQL, explore schema, explain a query, compare hosts — now lives in Tools, the last group in Main.

AI Agent stays its own top-level group. Postgres hosts do not see Tools at all (ClickHouse-family only). DBA, Engineer, and SRE all keep Tools.