www.uptimesoftware.com Beautiful Dashboards vs. Deep Reporting What’s More Important? UNIFIED IT MONITORING Alex Bewley, CTO
Nov 30, 2014
www.uptimesoftware.com
Beautiful Dashboards vs. Deep Reporting
What’s More Important?
UNIFIED IT MONITORING
Alex Bewley, CTO
www.uptimesoftware.com
What are we talking about today?
• Dashboards versus/and/or/maybe Reporting
• Dashboards: Real-time super-cool, lots of pretty colours. – Seen in Big Data, Cloud-based XaaS offerings (APM)
• Reports: Boring Excel and PDF, volumes of information. – Reminders of ‘The Office’
Well, what are you trying to solve? – Let’s break it down a bit
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What kinds of dashboards are there?
• Data Oriented
• Informative/Summary
• KPI (Key Performance Indicators)
• BSM (Business Service Management)
What are you trying to achieve? – Are you learning anything?
– Are you saving yourself time or money?
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What roles use dashboards?
• IT Operations – Developers (APM)
– Operations
• IT Manager
• Line of Business
• CXO
Who cares? – Well, the people who need them!
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Who is consuming the dashboard?
• Gear the design to the consumer of it Need to be very careful what information is displayed
Make sure that it’s relevant for the audience
• Start thinking about key business metrics Mapping the IT world to the business world
Note: it’s not always easy (or possible)!
• An Application isn’t always an Application I say Tomato you say Tomahto
WebSphere or Exchange NOT an Application
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Examples
• The evolution of the dashboard – Infrastructure to Business
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A Data Dashboard
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Data Dashboards w/ Summary and Aggregate (Top 10) Information
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A Topology Dashboard (for an Application)
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Dashboard with KPI & BSM Information
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Dashboards
• The Pros – Pretty (mostly)
– Salient snapshot of important data
– Great for non-technical users
• The Cons – Limited time frame
– Potential lack of context
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Reports
• Why – Data over a long period of time (trend analysis)
• How are they used? – Capacity planning
– Cost management
– Distribution to end-user groups
– People who don’t have access to the monitoring system
• SaaS – Seems to be report free – why?
– Lots of SaaS products lack reporting in depth
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Consumers of Reports
• They are the same as dashboards – BUT…. different goals
• Psychologically, reports are used differently – Reports get read
– You’ll remember to read it if it’s in your inbox, but you’ll generally forget to check a portal
– People like to play with data
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Examples
• Forensics – So, what happened yesterday?
• Capacity Planning – Summaries to Line-of-Business Managers/Teams
– Serve a large community of users w/o access to up.time
• Summary Growth reports – Comparing large point-in-time differences (storage growth)
• Service Level Agreements – Better SLA planning with historical and “rear-view mirror” data
– Highly interdependent systems can cause application outages, even if outages are small
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www.uptimesoftware.com www.uptimesoftware.com
www.uptimesoftware.com www.uptimesoftware.com
www.uptimesoftware.com
Getting the Best of Both Worlds
• How do you combine real-time dashboards with deep reporting?
• What’s out there?
• How should you evaluate a solution?
• How can you manage virtualized, hybrid cloud, or pure cloud environments?
www.uptimesoftware.com www.uptimesoftware.com
What does up.time monitor?
Business Services
Applications
Virtualization
Servers
Network
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Next steps…
• Set up a 1:1 custom demo – [email protected]
• Call us at: – 1.866.735.4304
• Download a trial of up.time: – www.uptimesoftware.com
www.uptimesoftware.com
Map Dashboard Topology Dashboard Capacity Dashboard
Global Scan Resource Scan
Thanks!
@AlexBewley