Before the decade ends, show us your Orion Maps AND answer a few questions about them -- for 500 THWACK points!

2: What we're missing is CLICK TO DRAG. I'm sorry, but holding a key to drag is ridiculous and unintuitive. Either have a button for select mode/drag mode, or a button to press to toggle between. I've not seen applications where click to drag is not a standard feature and I find that grinds my gears   That part is a total UX/UI fail. What if someone is one handed or has a disability? Are they supposed to use their nose? There is no accessibility thought of. Same thing with select/multi-select. And I say this as someone without said disability and I can't even.

3: I find maps super important! They look good, they have great potential value, and they are literally an important showcase of what I want to do with solarwinds for the organization. I think it will become more and more central as monitoring grows at my company.

If I didn't have this, I'd be looking at some data visualization app immediately like grafana/plotly/highcharts/nodered/catalytic. I still might for certain things when solarwinds doesn't display metrics properly, but for hierarchy/visualization you guys are on a great path.

designerfx​ appreciate the feedback - this was absolutely thought of and debated heavily during the design process. This was also never brought up as an issue or concern during any user testing, Beta, RC, or the 2019.2 release.  That being said, it is certainly an option that could always be changed, but what about when you want to perform a lasso or marque selection?  Are you going to want to click a button to be able to do that every time? 

What is the issue with select or multi-select?

jblankjblank​ I agree with your assessment of how triggering a lasso would be 100% fine - so long as there is a lasso button . It's really the same premise. I don't know if people complain about MS paint having a lasso, as a common application. The reason I mention the same about multiple selections is because how would I also theoretically do that if I had a disability/single hand? Same potential issue.

However, if I show anyone Orion they're going to expect click to drag as basically a standard function. Not "hold a button to do it".

People wouldn't have mentioned it in 2019.2 because new maps weren't even worth considering in 2019.2, to be frank . With 2019.4 you really brought the heat as far as bringing a lot of the features forward and now it's something people are going to look at   My argument for click to drag is the worldmap We have it there, so it's not like it's even outside of Orion functionality in other places.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts designerfx​.  We always strive to think about our different users and use cases in the design of our features, and yet we cannot always win everyone over.  I can understand your opinion on the click to drag behavior, as a matter of fact, this was the way we implemented that functionality in the static sub-view maps on details pages.  In our goal to provide a web based designer we did quite a bit of research, and the current implemented functionality is no different than the likes of Visio, Lucid Chart, DrawIO, or even Adobe Photoshop and more.  So the click space bar to pan the map appeared to be fairly common functionality across many different tools.  We can certainly add some functions to make it more accessible and easier to use and have hopes to do so.  This would be a perfect opportunity for you to submit a feature request where we could track interest in making a change.  Maybe something like scroll bars around the canvas would make this easier without changing the behavior?  Again, open to feedback. 

With every release we want to make adjustments, enhance what is existing to improve usability, and also add new functionality.  It is always a game (quite frustrating at times) of balance.  Unfortunately we can't just flip a switch or get everything we wanted in each release.  The 2019.2 release was no exception.  While you found it not worth considering, many others were quite pleased to see the newly added functionality.  The Maps Team is really our own worst critic and while we would have loved to include more, we were doing something that had never been done before in a new framework by creating a new web based editor in Orion, as well as a new responsive graph widget.  With all the touch points that maps have within the platform, this was quite a monumental task which we are very proud of.  More importantly, this allows us to gather useful feedback as we continue to develop the feature, rather than just sit on some cool functionality that could be useful to some. 

We hope that the latest changes and future releases provide functionality that improve the usability of the platform and offer a critical tool for visualizing data in Orion.  We have a lot more we want to accomplish and provide to all of you to make it even better.  The 3 question in this thread is so that we can share these thoughts with the business to ensure we continue to get to do so.  Thank you. 

Thank you for sharing your thoughts designerfx​.  We always strive to think about our different users and use cases in the design of our features, and yet we cannot always win everyone over.  I can understand your opinion on the click to drag behavior, as a matter of fact, this was the way we implemented that functionality in the static sub-view maps on details pages.  In our goal to provide a web based designer we did quite a bit of research, and the current implemented functionality is no different than the likes of Visio, Lucid Chart, DrawIO, or even Adobe Photoshop and more.  So the click space bar to pan the map appeared to be fairly common functionality across many different tools.  We can certainly add some functions to make it more accessible and easier to use and have hopes to do so.  This would be a perfect opportunity for you to submit a feature request where we could track interest in making a change.  Maybe something like scroll bars around the canvas would make this easier without changing the behavior?  Again, open to feedback. 

With every release we want to make adjustments, enhance what is existing to improve usability, and also add new functionality.  It is always a game (quite frustrating at times) of balance.  Unfortunately we can't just flip a switch or get everything we wanted in each release.  The 2019.2 release was no exception.  While you found it not worth considering, many others were quite pleased to see the newly added functionality.  The Maps Team is really our own worst critic and while we would have loved to include more, we were doing something that had never been done before in a new framework by creating a new web based editor in Orion, as well as a new responsive graph widget.  With all the touch points that maps have within the platform, this was quite a monumental task which we are very proud of.  More importantly, this allows us to gather useful feedback as we continue to develop the feature, rather than just sit on some cool functionality that could be useful to some. 

We hope that the latest changes and future releases provide functionality that improve the usability of the platform and offer a critical tool for visualizing data in Orion.  We have a lot more we want to accomplish and provide to all of you to make it even better.  The 3 question in this thread is so that we can share these thoughts with the business to ensure we continue to get to do so.  Thank you.