Category: Software Architecture

This is the fourth article in my series on systems monitoring for software developers. In this article I want to talk about using dashboards for displaying information generated by your monitors.

The system monitor discussed previously will collect a lot of data from different systems. The amount of information that is collected can be vast and in its raw form may not be that useful except to people who really understand what the data represents. The key thing with a dashboard is to break this information down for different users. This may be a complete view of the data, or just a subset for different purposes, so you have to think about the context in which the data is going to be provided and the intended audience.

For me, a key requirement of the dashboard I built was to make the data from the monitor available to my development and operations team in an easy to view format. This dashboard contains more technical information including exceptions as that is more appropriate for the intended audience. You may need to provide another dashboard to key business stakeholders. The level of information you provide here would most likely be different and contain more business level data.

Your dashboard may be viewed in different places. This might include a large TV attached to the wall, projected against a wall, or the dashboard might be run on a person’s desktop computer. If you are displaying the dashboard in a place where people cannot interact with it, i.e. on a large TV Screen, then you want to make sure the dashboard automatically refreshes itself. I will cover this more later on in the article.

Types of Dashboard

Technology

You really are spoilt for choice these days when it comes writing a dashboard. You can keep the display simple or you can really embellish the presentation. As I said earlier, it depends on your target audience. I personally find that keeping the display simple is the best thing to do. I have seen some dashboards that go overboard with dials, speedometers and other fancy graphics, and these can confuse the information you are trying to communicate if you are not careful.

Windows Application

You can develop your dashboard as a native application. This is what I did with my own solution for the company I work for.  I work at a company that is based around the Microsoft stack, so this really gave me 2 choices as a .NET developer; Winforms or WPF. As I needed to get the dashboard up and running quickly I used Winforms, mainly because I am very familiar with this particular technology. WPF would also have been a very good choice.

My dashboard was aimed squarely at a technical audience, so the level of detail could be higher. The context of the dashboard was to allow developers spot any problems in our critical systems. I decided to keep the screen design very simple. I used a tabbed control, where each tab represented one sensor from the xml stream written out by the monitoring system.

This is the third article in my series on system monitoring for application developers. The previous article covered the basic code architecture for the system monitor.

This article will talk about the deployment of your system monitor to start monitoring production systems. A lot of what I discuss here is from experience, especially as I work in a regulated industry (Financial Services), which threw up a few interesting challenges on how I could achieve rapid deployments and application feedback without breaking any rules.

Deploying into a Production Environment

The goal of your monitoring tool is to regularly check over your critical production systems, so that means you need to deploy into production. If you work in a smaller company that doesn’t have a long and complex deployment process (By ‘complex deployment process’, I mean a process heavily bogged down with paper work a company processes), then this should be straight forward.

When developing monitors you want to be able to iterate quickly, and deploy early and often. If you work in an environment where you can do this and release into production quickly, then great. You need to do, just that. Every time you get a piece of functionality ready for prime time, release it. You just need to make sure that the server you deploy the monitor too can access any log files or databases to gather its information.

The diagram above shows what a typical deployment might look like. You have your monitoring server setup containing the monitor application and the task scheduler. This application then processes logs contained on each target system. The example above has web services, a website, and payment gateway and payment processors. This shows you your most basic type of deployment. This is great if you can do this type of deployment quickly and often.