i_like_eggs · Just an egg · ✭✭✭✭✭

Small milestone today. The SolarWinds series has now passed 2,000 views across the full set. What started as a few dashboard ideas has turned into a wider conversation around evidence-led monitoring, operational state, and how we make SolarWinds tell a clearer operational story. Really appreciate everyone who has viewed,…

Using polling completion alongside CPU, memory and packet loss, with a safe margin to ensure nodes are only moved onto clearly healthy engines, feels like a sensible way to reduce manual overhead on larger estates. Nice additions 👍

Very cool, good job guys 👍 making an investment in custom properties are definitely the move for scaling these dashboards they are really the spine of the platform

Thanks John, I really appreciate that. I love building dashboards, so the idea of a competition sounds great. I have been experimenting with some new motion techniques recently, including a dashboard that progressively assembles itself as the page loads ✌️ Maybe this is my next THWACK post 🤔

Thank you, really appreciate you following and supporting the series throughout 👍

Thank you, I really appreciate the support throughout the series. Very glad the posts have earned a place in the bookmarks 🙂

Welcome to thwack, @mariefab Great to see someone joining from Cork. I’m Irish myself, although I live in London these days, so I had to say hello. Looking forward to seeing you around the community

I have just realised I have been scrolling up and down the interface list watching the different lanes light up 😂 I swear it was not more than ten minutes 🫣, but it is ridiculously satisfying watching the directional posture move across the interfaces in real time

Thanks @vinay.by really appreciate it my friend. 😎 I thought the series was finished, but this one was too much fun not to share

Thank you @naveensingh43 , @vinay.by, @John.Summers and @silverbacksays for the kind words on the series . I genuinely appreciated the encouragement. i could not resist one more dashboard. 😎 This one takes live Orion interface evidence and resolves it into directional posture. The lane colours, degraded states, stale…

Thank you all for following the series so far, @vinay.by @naveensingh43 @fop @tobyw_loop1 I really appreciate the feedback and encouragement along the way. Part 5 is now available if you are interested: Vector Engine - Resolving Live Evidence into Service Posture ✌️

Yes. In practice, these views load faster than a typical interface utilisation report covering around 20 interfaces, in some cases under 3 seconds. I have used them across both internal and customer environments for around three years, through platform updates and upgrades, without any noticeable CPU or RAM issues…

Good question. @tobyw_loop1 One of the things that makes this approach particularly useful is that it stays within the existing SolarWinds dashboard framework. It is not a separate custom web page, an external front end, or a modification to the SolarWinds web server. The visual layer is rendered inside the widget using…

I really enjoyed the London World Tour event. One thing that stayed with me was the conversations around moving beyond simple uptime and using observability to deliver clearer operational insight and measurable value. I ended up building a SolarWinds World Tour Control Deck around that idea. It started as a bit of visual…

@vinay.by thanks mate :) if you get a chance Part 4 is now available Part 4: Platform Observability Reactor - Monitoring the Monitoring - THWACK

I really had to zoom out for this one hopefully it didn't blow up to much 😅

Thanks mate, The full query is tied quite closely to my wider framework and still needs some cleanup before it would be reusable outside my environment 👍

Thanks mate 😁

A quick follow-up to show how the Observability Lens changes as the monitoring-trust posture shifts. The visual state is driven by the same evidence model underneath the dashboard. As confidence changes, the lens adapts its colour, pressure arc, animation, and supporting explanation. Below are examples of the different…

Part 2 is now live if you are interested - thanks again for the feedback on the dashboards. I took this one in a more operational direction. Part 2. Observability Lens: A Glass View into the Evidence Layer - THWACK @vinay.by @naveensingh43 @martian_monster

Thanks mate :)

One of my favourite dashboard experiments so far: a Node Down Signal Map. Instead of presenting unavailable nodes as another flat table, this view turns each down node into a visible signal around the overall node-down state. It is still a simple view of nodes that are currently down, but the presentation makes the scale…

Experimenting with another way to visualise service state. Not every concept needs to become a production dashboard. Some are useful simply because they test new presentation patterns and help identify what improves signal recognition 👍

Bob. He occasionally wanders around my SolarWinds environment while I experiment with ideas that sit slightly outside traditional monitoring dashboards.

World Tour — Live Animations A quick look at the dashboard in motion. The animations are not just decorative; they help draw attention to active signals and changing state.

Very nice, this would be really useful for status pages 👍 It would also be good to see CPU and memory pressure alongside the main status, just to give more context when an alert does trigger. Even something simple could add a lot of value, for example: CPU pressure Memory pressure Last related event Alert count over the…

Arcade mode A deliberately playful dashboard experiment, using live SolarWinds evidence to explore how far the presentation layer can be pushed without losing the underlying operational signal.

Glass Operations A layered glass-style treatment of the same evidence model, with a more restrained visual hierarchy and stronger emphasis on the current estate posture.

Daylight Mode The same live SolarWinds evidence rendered as a lighter visual treatment, exploring whether operational clarity can be retained without relying on a dark background.

Dark Operations A darker operational treatment of the same live SolarWinds evidence, designed to make availability, alert activity, hardware health, and volume posture immediately readable.