i_like_eggs · Just an egg · ✭✭✭✭✭

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.

SolarWinds World Tour inspired dashboarding 😋

lol thinking to update all my customer dashboarding to this theme, i can already see their faces :S

i love the dark mode too

hey, The first one is the node status behaviour around polling failures. From 2026.1 onwards, SolarWinds now exposes polling issues more directly. So if ICMP is working but SNMP, WMI or WinRM polling is failing, the node can show as Critical or Misconfigured with a “Polling is failing” message. That is useful visibility,…

Yeah, exactly. A simple Polling Hygiene dashboard, or even alerting around those objects, would go a long way here. For me, it comes back to: Evidence → State → Action I’ll be interested to see where SolarWinds takes this natively, but until then I’ll keep building around that mindset. I do think this is a missed…

This will definitely catch out environments that have broad “Node Status is Critical” type alerts. (some people really do set those up) 😕 It highlights the importance of polling-health alerts and hygiene across the platform, not just for nodes, but also volumes, interfaces and components. There is probably a wider…