As indicated in WHAT IS THE ENTERPRISE OPERATIONS CONSOLE (EOC) & HOW DOES IT WORK? 2.0!!, significant changes have occurred to the Enterprise Operations Console (EOC 2.0) with the latest release. These changes were made in order to improve upon functionality available to our users, as well as the overall experience of using the tool. We believe the latest version of EOC has been a significant step in the right direction, allowing users to have a more effective method of rolling up status, and decreasing the time to identify and isolate issues from EOC. This version also begins to introduce some unique capabilities providing users with more control, as well as enabling them to analyze/ triage directly within EOC.
My plan is to produce a series of articles to discuss some of the changes and new features implemented in our latest release. These enhancements were made based on customer input and while they provide a new perspective, EOC 2.0 can still provide similar views and functions that you did not want to go away.
Lets discuss how EOC Classic rolled up data, and how some users new to EOC 2.0 are wondering where resources such as the "All Nodes" or "Top XX" resources have gone. To begin, lets look at some of the old views that EOC Classic provided users.
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Aaaahhhhhhh. The sea of lists and tables in an outdated UI 
. After all, the views provided via EOC Classic were meant to highlight current statistics from across distributed instances in the same manner that EOC 2.0 does today. However, based on your feedback, many of you found these views uncompelling and limited in their value. Now I am actually a huge advocate for resources such as a simple Top XX. With the right customization available, Top XX resources can be very powerful and provide a ton of value. This is really personal preference and many of you may feel the same way. Anyone interested in the EOC - What We Are Working On - SEP 2017 can review that page as continued effort to build upon the 2.0 release is already under way.
In reviewing a resource such as an All Nodes Tree or in EOC Classic the Global Node Status by Site, this is a list view of each node per Orion Instance. Expanding an option like the Orion Americas example would provide a list of 214 nodes that can be scrolled through to identify different status's across your distributed environment.
There are a couple issues with this. The example provided above isn't even that long of a list compared to most of your environments, and as you can see, I have to continue to scroll to determine which devices are in what state. It is also strictly specific to Nodes. There were many of you that wanted to focus on other areas of interest in your environment and incorporate other entities such as interfaces, storage arrays, etc... Many of your environments also probably looked like the screenshot below:
Yellow icons through the entire list, again requiring you to expand and scroll to determine impact and whether there is something actionable. Keep in mind that in versions of EOC prior to 2.0, the manner used to collect data often resulted in delays in representing accurate status. This was another problem we were asked to solve. EOC 2.0 has developed a new method for collecting its data and many customers have been extremely pleased. This is discussed in the WHAT IS THE ENTERPRISE OPERATIONS CONSOLE (EOC) & HOW DOES IT WORK? 2.0!! post.
While the new views, specifically the Enterprise Summary View, may be a bit of a change, our customer base was looking for a better method for having an executive-like breakout of entities across the distributed environment. The Enterprise Summary Tiles provide EOC users with the ability to create summarized windows of their infrastructure in a limitless number of combinations. While the tiles are new and take some getting used to, this feature provides a powerful option to see a lot of detail with little scrolling. Below is an example of what you may choose to create which would be similar to the previous Global Node Status by Site resource:
Lets look at this even closer, because what these tiles offer is currently not possible in remote Orion Instances or EOC 1.6.3 and earlier. As a user of EOC, I am able to get a quick concise view of the nodes at this site along with other details such as;
If that same user is interested in addressing an issue, clicking on any status icon will redirect them to the Asset Explorer with a pre-filtered list, no searching required. If however, that list is long, we provide a search option for users to leverage.
The Active Alerts resource on the same page will be a global list of alerts similar to the other resources in the EOC Classic summary view. There is even a quick "Filter Sites" button at the top of the dashboard itself, where the you can select a particular site or sites, and see only active alerts and status for those locations. Early adopters indicated this was much faster in identifying critical issues or equipment they were searching for vs methods the previous versions of EOC provided.
The Enterprise Summary View cannot be modified/ customized other than the layout, or beyond what resources are available today. This means that admins cannot add additional resources to this view. We are working on enhancements for future releases and certainly envision more flexibility with the resources and the page itself. The Enterprise Operations Console 2.0 also allows for unique role based access by creating custom accounts. In this manner, users can have their own exclusive version of the Enterprise Summary Dashboard. Here is an example that I previously mocked up. In this scenario, imagine an EOC user that was responsible for a specific set of stores or sites. While the NOC Manager has the administrative views of the entire corporate infrastructure, this particular "Store Administrator" only needed insight into their particular area of responsibilities. In this dashboard the user has a tile which represents an overview of the total amount of equipment at each store, as well as a tile broken out to represent each store individually. The alerts across all 5 stores are represented in the Active Alerts view. |
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There is certainly additional customization's that can be done within EOC 2.0. Under My Dashboards, you will see a menu item for Enterprise Console, with 3 sub-menus: Enterprise Summary, Enterprise Maps, and Performance Analysis.
The 2nd article in this series describes how to customize and create your own unique summary views within EOC.
Understanding Changes In EOC 2.0 - The Enterprise Maps View
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