Following on from my recent SolarWinds dashboard series, I have been experimenting with another way to represent live operational evidence.
This one is called Interface Intelligence:
The dashboard is rendered directly inside SolarWinds using SQL-generated HTML, CSS, and inline SVG over live Orion interface data.
Each scoped service interface is represented as a bidirectional evidence lane:
- the left side represents inbound flow
- the right side represents outbound flow
- lane colour represents the resolved state for that direction
- packet speed increases with directional utilisation
- stale evidence remains visible as a dashed lane
- hover cards expose the evidence behind the selected state
- interface lanes can drill directly into the underlying trends view
The aim is not simply to animate traffic.
The aim is to make the operational story easier to recognise at a glance.
A heavily utilised outbound path should not falsely colour the inbound path red.
An interface with errors or discards should not look the same as a hard-down interface.
A stale polling signal should not quietly appear healthy.
The visual language is deliberately simple:
Green → Healthy
Amber → Warning pressure
Purple → Degraded quality
Red → Critical
Dashed → Stale / Unknown
The moving packets are evidence as well:
Dot speed → directional utilisation
This is another small step in the same direction as the wider series:
Evidence → State → Problems / Advisory → Action
The screenshot uses normalised public labels, but the metrics and posture are driven by live Orion evidence
if you fancy some other ideas you can follow my wider work here on THWACK.
