I have a client working with a “developer” who was saying how hard this was to do.

While not a developer myself i know the principles thanks for laying them out here.

Now I just need to find the time to write a spec to get this working so i can automate capture of Twitter WordPress related plugins etc.

Thanks for taking the time.

It sounds like you're looking for new UI components/paradigms. I think you're better of looking at a live system rather than screenshots. You can use the live demo on our website.
http://www.ifountain.com/rapidinsight/demo

In RI, we mostly use typical components, grids, maps, pie charts, etc. key being presentation layer showing all the relevant information from disparate systems seamlessly. Another key point is the interaction between the components in a view. Components are dynamic, interaction in one component reflects on others,etc.

We found these are key enabler techniques to make presentation layer effective.

There are also some examples of different UI components. you can try
- service view tab, click on a menu in service view and select Get Event History (uses timeline to show events)
- select get Device locations to see google maps type integration.
- data is brought from the server as user moves around in the list views (live grid concept) which is key for the UI to scale to large systems.
- in search tabs, refinement of the search query as the user click on the results

Jeff

It makes a lot of sense, events and performance are intertwined, and ops need to be able to correlate them at least visually hence the need to align the events and performance data as you've described.

In monitoring systems, performance exceptions are typically sent as events via snmp traps etc to the event management systems, bringing events from any source into the mgmt systems is essential but not always sufficient.
In addition to the consolidation of events, in RapidInsight, we've taken an approach that we describe as “integration in the presentation layer” http://www.ifountain.com/blog/RapidInsight:+wha...
where we combine all types of information (events, graphs, etc.) from multiple systems using a common model and user interface. This allows users to access performance reports/graphs in context of the events and vice versa.

Thanks for taking the time to blog this one… pushing external content into event stream data is getting hot! I've been working with an ISP who's attempting to align external-corp contextual event data with performance data to feed a performance database.

J3ffG1ll
J3ffG1ll.typepad.com

What did you end up doing about this anyway?

Just to be sure, in the approach above, the only prerequisite that needs to be installed on the server is Java VM. The rest are just jar files (for groovy and snmp) and scripts that can be unzipped to any directory and executed. I understand that RapidInsight would be an overkill just for something like this, but even RI is works by simply unzipping it to a directory.
XMLSlurper is part of groovy so it's already there, SNMP part above uses some utility classes in RI so they would need to be extracted from there to be used standalone but it's doable.

Now the cool thing would be to get this as self contained as possible so it's something very easy to install and use! Tracking down libraries, RPMs, packages, etc. is a pain for some folks these days, especially for non *nix environments.

Doug
BSM/ITSM Blog: http://dougmcclure.net