In short, no. There’s a lot of instructions with detailed steps for what to do to get it working, but they don’t tell you what following them achieves - if you see the distinction.
The very short version is:
Data arrives in emonCMS by one of two routes, either directly by LAN or via emonHub if it’s serial or USB. If it arrives via emonHub, it’s interpreted/converted by an Interfacer. On first arrival in emonCMS, it creates an input on the Inputs page (you don’t and can’t). The numbers can be manipulated there (scaled, offset, integrated power→energy, etc) in steps called Input Processes and somewhere along the line must be sent to a Feed, which is the database. You create a Feed from inside an Input Process. If you don’t send the data to a Feed, nothing happens to it and it’s lost when the next value appears and overwrites it. If no data comes in on time after you’ve created a Feed and it’s a Fixed Interval feed, you get NULL values in the database, which cause havoc in graphs. Graphs/Visualizations/Dashboards/Apps extract data from Feeds and display it.
You can also try reading this New user old emon devices - #10 by Robert.Wall, which I wrote recently for someone equally lost.
@awjlogan The RPi version of emonCMS tends to lead the on-line version when new features are introduced.