The Dashboard: your total view of the world
Okay...the dashboard doesn't exist yet, but it sure would be cool!
The dashboard is an as of yet hypothetical application, inspired in part by Spectrum™'s "device view". The vision is an integrated single web page that can dynamically tell you the full state of any host or device in your environment. This could include (but is not limited to) things like this:
 | embedded graphs of recent network and OS trends |
| output from top, vmstat, iostat, etc. |
| application status (via app-specific test scripts) |
| a button that pops up an ssh session |
| links to recent tickets related to this kind of machine |
| links to troubleshooting tips for this kind of machine |
While this sounds much like what some of the monolithic network management packages offer, it's a very different beast. The intent is that the dashboard itself is only a small part of the total picture, and primarily used for examining views from the other pieces of the menu. In our case, the ideal dashboard would smoothly allow us to view, in real time, data from Cricket, Remedy, and Netcool.
So...why doesn't it exist? The dashboard simply keeps falling off the bottom of the priority list. Anyone interested in creating such an application should contact Jeff.
