In the past few weeks I have been trying to figure out ways to use our Orion infrastructure to solve several internal problems such as system inventory, software license tracking and Run Book based escalation policies. Last night on my drive home I came up with what I think is a feature that would solve many of these as well as provide a tone of additional flexibility to the product; Data Objects.
A Data Object would be nothing more than a user defined object in Orion that contains user data which can then be assigned to Nodes, Interfaces, Volumes, and Applications. There would be some area in Orion (much like the SAM App Template management area now) where all of the Data Objects would be stored and managed. You would have the ability to assign a Data Object to one or many Nodes, Interfaces, Volumes and Applications. You would also have the ability to assign the same Data Object multiple times.
If you were at a Node level view for a node that had Data Objects assigned there would be a resource showing all of the assigned DO's and when you click on them they would open and show the data that they contained which could be anything from Run Book information to software licensing information.
Some example use cases are as follows...
Run Book
You could create a DO that contains how to handle the escalation of problems on specific node and assign it to that node. You could then create an Advanced Alert that has a Macro to pull the data out of the DO assigned to the node and include that in the alert.
Software License Tracking
You could create a DO to represent each type of software license that needs to be tracked and include necessary information about that license such as cost in the DO. Then for each node where those licenses are applied you would assign the DO. Finally you write a report that would tell you how many license of each type are in use and which nodes they are on.
These are just a few examples of how this feature could be leveraged; I am sure others could come up with many others.
