How We've Improved Business Service Monitoring

At Opsview we're always listening to our customers' feedback so that we can make our features the best that they can be. Business Service Monitoring, otherwise known as BSM, is a great way of monitoring an individual service or groups of services across multiple hosts.

If you’ve never used BSM before, reading this feature description is a must!  — https://www.opsview.com/product/features/business-service-monitoring. Even more in-depth documentation can be found at https://knowledge.opsview.com/docs/business-service-monitoring.

So, what was the problem? Some of our customers thought that BSM was complicated to configure and maintain, as well as visually uninspiring. We’ve heard you and we’ve done something about it in our Opsview 6.4 release.

A Modern, Well-Designed User Experience

A lot of work was done to provide our customers with a user experience that would allow them to quickly and easily find issues impacting their Business Services by providing visibility all the way down to the service check level.

The data visualization shown is a tree diagram. This was chosen because the nodes clearly represent the parent/child relationship between the Business Service, Components, Host, and its Service Checks. This also makes monitoring a BSM Service clearer in a second's glance, easier to read, and allows for the display of problems our customers are facing in a larger context.

We had the idea. All we needed to do was make it happen.

Here’s the scoop…

A New Application

Yes, I said it. We’ve rebuilt the feature from scratch.

If you're sitting there reading this, worrying and thinking:

"Oh no, I just got everything setup the way I wanted it in the old view!"

Don't worry, we've got your back. You can still access the old view if you want to use that for now. But, I have the feeling you'll want to use the new one once you've tried it.

In the Opsview Engineering team, one of our primary focuses is to build our new applications and migrate some of our other feature-rich applications over to use the Angular framework, away from the ExtJS framework. We're doing this for so many good reasons, like being able to leverage its component-based architecture, as well as easily integrating it with data visualization libraries like D3 to produce visually inspiring and useful features.

What is D3?

D3 is known as a data visualization library. These kinds of libraries are tools for the graphical representation of data. They use elements such as charts or graphs to demonstrate relationships of data to show trends and patterns of important information to users.

The way that this library works is by harnessing the latest web standards, including SVG, HTML5, and the Canvas element. This means this library is compatible across all the browsers where these web standards are supported. In our case, that was SVG. This means that the feature is compatible with all of our supported browsers! Don't you just love it when a plan comes together?

Summary

Data visualization is such an important part of Opsview. Well-designed and modern user experiences that we implement allow us to help our customers really get to grips with what's happening within their IT infrastructure. And by using the latest technology in engineering, we can achieve the results that our customers want to see. I think we've addressed the visually uninspiring feedback…it's time to get started on the rest.