We finally upgraded to the newest version of Orion 2 weeks ago and yesterday I discovered the new Performance Analysis Widget. At first I was super excited by this, and overall I still am happy this is an option, but after playing with it a bit more I'm a bit confused and a little bummed. It seems like a lot of seemingly obvious features are missing from this and I don't get why they weren't put in to begin with... Maybe they were though and I'm missing something, which leads me to my first of several points/questions about this new feature:
- The lack of help documentation on this new widget (and the new Custom Tiles widget which is super confusing in its implementation and lack of help, but I digress...) is a bit frustrating.
- The first place I saw this new widget was on a Node Details page for one of our Linux nodes. It appears to be an out-of-the-box widget called "Load Average". What stinks is that when going to a Windows node that widget doesn't show up. This is because Load Average isn't an available metric for WMI nodes. This is where I get super-confused. Who at SolarWinds spent time making a highly customized node details widget that only works for Linux (or maybe just any SNMP monitored node)?? You'd think if SolarWinds only made one custom widget, it'd be for Windows nodes since I imagine that is going to be a majority of the server's that most businesses use. It's been that way at every company I've ever seen or worked for at least...
- There doesn't appear to be a way to create our own Node Details performance analysis charts that automatically show the metrics for the node we are currently looking at. This new widget only seems to allow us to put saved projects and I can't find a way to make a saved project display metrics for a wildcard node...
In closing, this new widget is absolutely great for summary pages where we can plant nice looking and interactive charts for static objects, however they appear pretty useless for object Details pages or for displaying Top N charts where we would want the contents of the chart to change based on the context of the page we're looking at.
I really hope this is already being worked on by SolarWinds as it just seems like a really rushed feature right now. It feels like this feature was implemented to check off a box on somebody's to-do list rather than implemented as a way to provide their customers with something that is fully featured and functional at launch. If these missing features are on their way soon, then awesome! I can't wait! If not, then I guess we can do the whole Feature Request thing and wait for it to eventually get done. I just hope it's sooner rather than later.
I know I am coming across as frustrated, I apologize. SolarWinds really seems on the cusp of some really cool things, but I've noticed a trend of great new features launching with underwhelming functionality (the new Manage Entities page that requires tons of clicks and contains tons of wasted white-space, Orion SRM and its quite limited feature-set when compared to the old STM, Orion VMAN and its quite limited feature-set when compared to the old VMAN, Release Candidate products frequently releasing without Release Notes, new updated Tooltips/PopOvers feature released without the ability customize them, WPM not being updated with more than a couple of hotfixes in YEARS, etc..., etc...). I am a long-time Orion user and I love the product. That is the reason I am a bit frustrated as I really feel like this new UI has a lot of possibilities, but I feel like the company is in such a hurry to get the features out that they aren't taking the time to fully test them and flesh them out before launch, and they definitely aren't taking the time to insure that good and thorough help documentation is made available prior to launching the features.
