Everything in one place.

Software and technology companies operate in one of the most rapidly evolving industries of all, with immense shifts in development, infrastructure, customer expectations and business models. The ability to continually keep pace with these changes whilst grappling with fragmented business systems, siloed data and manual processes is increasingly hard.

The ability to consolidate information and make sense of relevant data streams is something that keeps many a CIO up at night. And this isn’t just limited to managing “big data”. We’re seeing an increasing trend of tools that offer a new look at workflow collaboration. Digital business demands a high degree of collaboration agility to improve team coordination. Slack, HipChat, Trello: these are relatively new tools that employ a SaaS model and aim to improve visibility of where workstreams are at any given time.

For any of these services to work effectively, a clear and concise dashboard is critical.

The advent of open source back end platforms such as Prometheus and Elasticsearch has enabled developers to focus on innovation rather than the burden of maintaining expensive hardware and software. Core metrics are displayed in traditional graphical format, but these are largely relied on by the developers themselves. The end users, for whom the product has been built, need a go to tool for communicating insights about a piece of data. Databoard and Tableau have recognised the desire for visualisation and offer an easy and scalable approach.

The importance of presenting critical information in graphical format has been a core component of our product development when it comes to NonStop monitoring.

The Reflex 80:20 Graphical Console is known as the OverDrive Status Monitor. The view represents the overall status of single or multiple NonStop nodes. OverDrive helps an installation to manage their NonStop nodes and active services by providing a graphical view of nominated exception conditions. Installations that need to manage their network other than “by exception” can witness a richer EMS event stream by using the OverDrive top-level views in conjunction with the text based Console facility. The OverDrive display is made up of columns known as Classes, and within classes, icons that can represent an underlying group of objects, or a single object. Classes can be built to represent subsystems, services or local user applications.

The structure of this display is completely at the discretion of the user. The most common approach is to create either status or service views. Status views are Operations driven where groups of “like” things, such as disk, spoolers, Pathways, are assembled into the same class. A service class however, could contain a set of process icons, a set of file icons, a spooler device and a specific communications line, all of which support an application. Either approach is acceptable and it is possible to implement both and have the same icon in more than one class. Icons can represent physical objects such as a communications line or a state such as “TMF Hung Transaction”. Icons in the OverDrive display can flash either blue (vulnerable) or red (down). Vulnerable is meant to illustrate that a service is continuing but that it is threatened.

This simple, yet highly effective visual interface ensures that NonStop operators can see exactly what is happening with the environment, and act accordingly.

Reflex is trusted by some of the world’s most demanding organisations. We’d welcome the opportunity to discuss its capabilities, and how it should be a consideration for anyone moving to NonStop X.

Karl Gilbank | Sales & Marketing Director
+44 161 868 6658
www.insidertech.co.uk