Help building a dashboard

Let me say that it is beyond frustrating working with the product. It is very easy to setup and collect data. I think it is great for troubleshooting issues, but the CIO would like to see some dash boards.

I can create a dashboard, but I'm looking to create a background image and then just place some spinning dials over the image. When I set a background image, it never shows up. When I go to add data to the dashboard, I'm presented with what seems like a 1,000 options. I just want to find a simple representation for the host health, or whether it is up or down.  

My biggest frustration with the product is that there seems to be to much data represented that is not very easy to translate or represent with an object.