[upbeat electronic music]
>>I'm Head Geek Chrystal Taylor
and today I wanna talk about dashboards and specifically
I wanna talk about creating dashboards
for other people, not for yourself.
And it takes a different perspective
to look at what they need and what their needs are,
versus what you think that their needs are.
So I wanna talk about changing that perspective
and to that end I have Orion Product Manager,
Tony Johnson, joining me today.
>>Hey Chrystal.
Yeah, I'm very excited to share some dashboard knowledge
and I think you've immediately hit
on a good point there, the consumers of dashboards
from Orion may not necessarily have any knowledge
of the platform or any previous exposure.
So they can't actually define what they want see
or how they want to present it.
So today we're going to look at some
of the dashboarding frameworks that are available
in Orion, from modern dashboards that we've introduced
in the Orion Platform 2020.2,
to classic views and resources,
with the ability to rotate through NOC views
down to detailed level of information for the IT pro.
>>So let's jump right in.
I think we should address kind of three levels
of information required
and let's start at the highest level,
which would be your C-suites generally.
And they don't need a lot of information.
They definitely don't want a lot of information.
They don't have the time.
They really want something that very quickly
they can look at and say this is bad,
or this is good and move on with their lives.
They don't have all the time in the world
to figure out what all the things mean.
>>Sure and that's a perfect use case
for the new modern dashboard framework
delivered in the Orion Platform 2020.2, right?
So thinking about the KPI widget,
with its status-driven indications
for visual representation of those metrics
and the simplicity to drag and drop
those resources around the dashboard.
>>Oh yeah, absolutely.
The flexibility there is amazing.
And I don't know if our audience has had a chance
to look at the new modern dashboards
but if you're not on Orion 2020.2, check out the demo
because they are awesome
and they can't do everything yet.
One day, one day they'll be able to do everything.
We gotta get started somewhere
but they are pretty amazing.
And they're really great for visualizing data
in a new way that doesn't kind of confine itself
to some of the column format
and you can definitely get a lot of information in there
that's very quickly at a glance,
it can be as colorful as you want or need it to be.
And, you know, the example that we have right here
definitely showcases kind of some of those features
for that new dashboard
and something that would really suit
a higher level executive that would be looking
for a little bit information but not too much.
>>Exactly, you'll see in the example there,
there's not a lot of detailed information
or statistics or charts to interpret.
And of course, that modern dashboard framework,
as you mentioned, isn't bound by the rigid
column structure that's available in classic views
but simply allows the user more options
in terms of how they present their dashboard layout.
So with drag and drop for those widgets
and the ability to resize those
across the entire dashboard canvas,
you really have a lot more control
over how you choose to present that data.
>>Oh yeah, absolutely. I love it.
It took a little bit of time for me to get used to it
as a longstanding user of the old dashboards,
the old views areas, to get used
to the kind of modern dashboards.
But once I got into the swing of it,
I'm like, I can think of a million and one ways
to use this and make dashboards
that are more beautiful
and more easy to kind of see what the information is
that you're looking for at a glance
instead of, you know, all over the page.
And you know, you have to put it in this column.
So you're trying to fit the columns
for each different thing
and you don't have that problem
of like, Oh, well, these words
aren't going to fit in this column,
so I have to try and make a larger column or readjust
and now my map is stretched or whatever.
I mean, there's a lot of that in the old managed views
and I feel like the modern dashboards
kind of throws that out the window
because you can put different things
with different sizes wherever you want pretty much
and you don't have to worry about the restrictions,
which is nice, visually.
>>Yeah, absolutely.
And I suppose it touches on a good point there.
The modern dashboards are not intended to be a replacement,
as such, for classic views
but rather kind of complement them
with an alternative to how you want to present
and how you want to lay out the data.
There are still tons of or hundreds
of out-of-the-box resources and widgets available in Orion
that are more suitable for a different level,
or a different audience when it comes
to the type of dashboard you want to create.
So if we were to consider your IT pro,
they're going to need more information
than, you know, is it up or down?
Okay, they're interested in trends.
So when we look at the ability to create PerfStack projects
and embed those within your modern dashboards
and your classic views, it's giving additional insight
into the status-driven indications
that those KPI widgets might be providing.
But the needs of the IT pro are completely different
to the C-suite consumers of dashboards.
>>Absolutely and that's skipping ahead a little bit.
We don't wanna skip too far.
Next, we'll move down a level to the NOC view,
which I think is the natural next level.
It's kind of a mid level.
You need a bit of information.
You can put up multiple dashboards
and check that NOC view box
and let it kind of auto-rotate on its own.
So you can stick it on a TV somewhere
and well, in the remote timeframe of which we live in now,
you can still have that NOC view
and just have it on anybody's monitor,
instead of having to have the TV
'cause you maybe don't have access to that right now.
But in normal times, we put it up on a TV in a room
and everybody would be able to kind of see that
and rotate through the information.
So I consider the NOC view kind of like a mid-level,
so you need a bit of information
but it's gonna be on a TV most of the time.
And so you don't need it to be too detailed
because no one's gonna be going in
and checking that little tiny details.
You do need more information than the C-suite, for sure.
>>Absolutely, I really like what you've done there
with the example of the NetFlow data, right?
So looking at the critical metrics for network operations,
who's consuming most of the bandwidth,
where are my capacity problems?
Am I facing any immediate nodes which are down,
with the addition to add a little bit of historical data
if necessary, to add a little bit more context
to the overall picture of network operations.
>>Oh yeah, absolutely.
Having that information at a glance
and one of the other pages there
on the NOC view is going to have a map
that kind of just has things grouped together
just to showcase that you don't have to have
necessarily a network map.
You can have things together that are grouped together
in some other format.
So, you know, on one side we've got our WAN links
and those are important to see.
We wanna see they're up, we wanna know information.
They're able to be drilled down to if we need to.
And then on the right-hand side,
maybe we have some poor applications
that we need information on.
So you can quickly at a glance say, okay,
our SQL cluster is not having a good time right now.
Why is that?
Well, let's go figure that out.
That's very important.
>>Absolutely. It's providing a little bit more context,
as to the impacts a potential outage
or performance degradation is going to have
on the entire operation of your business.
So whether it's looking at proportional charts from NetFlow,
or again, those capacity and trending resources,
or as you mentioned, the status of your WAN links,
in conjunction with the status
of applications and systems such as SQL.
So putting together that big picture
but at a glance, having a lot of valuable information
that you know, folks in those NOC teams
are able to easily digest and understand root cause.
>>Yeah, definitely.
If you can just walk down
to your neighbor's cube or whatever
and look at the TV real quick and see,
oh hey, there's something red there.
Let's go investigate that a bit more
'cause that's important.
Then you definitely know.
I like to also recommend the alerts or the events widgets
depending on which you're using more in your Orion Platform
to kind of very quickly say, okay,
well, if there's events, they're gonna be color-coded,
so you can quickly say okay,
there's a problem here also.
I like the status color-coding that we can showcase.
>>Yeah and, you know, kind of auditing
and event-driven information provides
additional benefit to understand
what has happened prior to an event.
So whether you're just presenting the last 25 events,
or the number of syslog messages segmented by criticality,
again, that color coding is going to help you
easily digest what has happened
in the status of that dashboard.
>>Absolutely.
And I think the mid-level and the high level are definitely
about easy digestion of data.
And then once we get more into the IT pro,
the detailed data, that's where we're looking
for a bit more meat.
We're not looking for easy digestion.
We're looking for something that we can sit there
and we can chew on for a little bit.
We can go dig down into and see that more information,
even more than what's on the dashboard,
that's where that level excels.
That's what they're looking for.
>>Absolutely, yeah.
So at that stage, you're getting into the troubleshooting.
Understanding what has happened at a specific device
or specific interface, or maybe a different entity
like an application or component monitor.
And you need a depth of information there
to build up a picture as to what has happened,
whether that's an increase in CPU, memory saturation,
disk IOPS, latency, response time.
We need to present the most, I suppose,
a rich data set for the IT pro to understand
what the specific cause was for a performance
or outage on an individual device.
>>Absolutely and the example that I created for this
is, you know, it's probably not as detailed
as you would think that it needs to be
but it depends on what you're looking for.
You know, if I was creating a dashboard
for maybe an Orion admin, this would definitely be full
of information on Orion servers.
There's a lot of custom SAM templates
that are already created for us to kind of look at
and see the health of our Orion servers.
And then we can also bring in information
on, you know, how the servers themselves are performing,
are their disks getting full,
that information you would put into a single dashboard.
And there are a wealth of built-in resources
to do that for us.
We don't have to get super fancy with, you know,
custom SQL or custom SWQL to make something work.
We can definitely use things like the account limitations
and the view limitations to limit that data,
to show us what we actually need to see
versus, you know, individually editing each resource
and kind of, you know, modifying each piece
but there are definitely cases in the IT pro realm
and also even higher than that in the NOC view
where we would want to audit individual resources
and edit them to filter to specific things
because those are the important things, you know?
Maybe we need a widget that's just on our SQL cluster.
If that's what we need it for, maybe we want one
that's divided by data center, or something like that.
Like there's definitely use cases for all of those things.
And when you create your dashboard,
all of those things have to be thought of,
you have to kind of think of those things,
or you're gonna be kind of modifying as you go
and that's definitely part of the process.
I feel like it's definitely a discussion process.
Talk to the consumer of the data
and if you're really not sure, really not sure,
you can present them with something
that you think will work for them
and then kind of work backwards from there.
Like, okay, well maybe they don't need that information
and you thought it was good information
but you're not that administrator, so.
>>Yeah, absolutely.
That touches on a really great point, there.
You mentioned view limitations.
A lot of the dashboards in Orion
when it comes to classic views
can be actually cookie cutter, right?
So if you consider a defined set of data
for all of your applications,
you can replicate that view,
add a view limitation to refine it to a subset
of systems or devices, so that you have that basic structure
and you can apply a different set of objects to it.
So whether it's at the entire dashboard level,
or perhaps as you mentioned for an individual widget,
the ability to filter down top 25 nodes
by response time to a specific location
or any attribute for those nodes,
you have that granular control
at your disposal to really refine
and define your dashboards.
>>Yeah, I definitely make heavy use
of view limitations, for sure.
I think that account limitations,
which are a little separate from what we're talking about
but account limitations are useful in a lot of ways
if you have multiple users of your Orion Platform
in general and they only need to view certain data
but if you're making a single dashboard
for whatever it may be.
Like in this case, I used a location.
So I limit it to a single location.
All of our resources automatically filter.
So like, if we put an event sort resource in there
or an alert resource,
we don't have to filter those individually.
All of that's gonna be filtered down
with our view limitation
and that makes it so much easier
to create views that are limited to anything really.
I mean, if you're using a group,
so if you're making a SQL dashboard
or if you're making a dashboard for your web admin
or whatever, you can use your custom properties
in conjunction with your limitation
to filter everything on the page,
down for them automatically.
And you can just cookie cutter a view
and then change the limitation
for the different things that you need,
instead of spending a bunch of time
on individual dashboards.
A lot of times it will work for you
to kind of have similar resources
and then you can just copy and paste that same view
and then change the limitation for whatever the need is.
And then change individual resources as like, one-offs.
Like, we need to add information
for this one specific thing that wouldn't be applicable
to a different specific thing.
So you can kind of create like a template.
>>Exactly and you've actually just reminded me
of a really great feature that we introduced
in the Orion Platform 2020.2
but also, you know, Orion and its modules
come with a wealth of out-of-the-box reports.
Those reports contain some nice custom tables,
custom charts that folks often want to see
in their dashboards.
And with that release of the Orion Platform,
we've introduced the ability to actually copy those
from the report definition into your dashboard.
So if there's a report out there that you really like
and you'd like to see it on your dashboard,
upgrading to 2020.2 will give you that functionality.
>>That's awesome.
That level of detail, especially if you have something
that you created ages ago
and you wanna add to a dashboard is great, is great.
And the functionality held within the Orion dashboards
to show data in particular ways
and join data from different places together,
if you wanna get a little bit more technical with it
and join a bunch of data together
so you can have information
from like the whole application stack.
If you were an app admin,
you would want information from the whole stack.
So you can put all of that information in one place
in your report for instance,
or even in just a custom table resource
and then put that on the dashboard,
so one and done, it's there now always, which is great.
>>Absolutely. There's such a wealth of options available.
You know, if we were to talk about even PerfStack resources
with the ability to automatically link related entities
and display those metrics over time,
then embedding those in your favorite summary views,
or modern dashboards, you really have a lot of options
when it comes to the type of data
and how you want to present it between modern dashboards,
classic views, out-of-the-box reports,
out-of-the-box widgets.
It really does depend on the consumer of the data.
>>Unfortunately, we don't have all the time in the world
to talk about all the various resources that we could use.
We only had a little bit of time
to kind of showcase some examples
and talk about how people would create their dashboards
and get a little bit creative.
Kind of get you in the right mindset
of like, what is this user looking for,
not what do I think that they need?
And it's just a perspective change, really.
I've created so many dashboards
over the last almost 10 years
and I've used them in multiple ways,
different formats, and there's always somebody out there
that gives me a new idea, or asks me a question
and I go, can I do that?
I'm pretty sure I can do that.
And then I'll go mess with it until I can figure it out.
And I think that that versatility is phenomenal
in getting things to display in a way
that makes the most sense to the audience of that dashboard.
So the person that has to be using it on a regular basis
and if you're in a position,
which I have had many discussions with people in a position
to have those discussions with other team members,
maybe they're the server team
uses the Orion Platform right now
and they're trying to expand that
to get different app teams to pull in their information.
And they're all reticent.
And like, no, I have my own thing that I need to use.
And I've definitely been a part of those projects
multiple times and I think getting a dashboard
that can show them information
that they didn't think that they could get,
or that they didn't think they could get in one place,
can make all the difference in the world
for their opinion of the platform
and for them to use it like it's intended to be used.
You definitely want your monitoring data to mean something
to the people that you're monitoring it for.
>>Definitely and, you know, we use the term,
swivel chair integration quite frequently
when we talk about comparing data across disparate systems.
Orion Platform and its modules bring together
those individual silos, so that now the network
and systems team can collaborate on a single dashboard.
So there's quite a ton of flexibility there
when it comes to how you extract the data,
or how you present it in Orion.
>>Well, we could really get in the weeds on this
and kind of go into all the different resources
and the capabilities and all of our years
of making dashboards could come to the fore here.
We could really go into it
but we unfortunately don't have the time today.
So thank you so much for joining me
and talking about building dashboards for the audience,
rather than for the administrator
that's creating that dashboard.
>>Absolutely and remember that modern dashboards
are only part of Orion Platform 2020.2,
so if there's anything that you've seen today
that you don't have on your platform,
you will need to upgrade.
Centralized upgrades, Orion maps improvements.
There is a long list for you to look up.
>>I would also say that if you're unfamiliar
with any of these new features or if you're unfamiliar
with kind of how everything works
for a new Orion administrator,
check out the resource links with this show
'cause there are definitely gonna be links
to documentation in there, creating the modern dashboards,
and a couple of other links related to managed views
and that kind of thing,
so you can get yourself started.
And I also recommend sharing your innovations
with everybody on THWACK as always
and checking out THWACK for other people's innovations,
because it can definitely spark creativity
and maybe help you solve a problem with the dashboard
you're creating now by looking
at what other people have done.
So check that out.
Thank you, Tony, for joining me today.
It's been so much fun.
>>Thank you everyone.