Cars cost a lot of money, and when a driver gets behind the wheel, they want to know that every component is working correctly. It can mean the difference between life and death—not to mention getting to your destination on time! For this reason, vehicle dashboards are painstakingly designed to be simple yet functional, so that virtually anyone can understand them at a glance.
In a similar vein, how much investment was involved in building up your organisation and its IT infrastructure—and let's not forget ongoing maintenance! The cost of system failure can mean life or death for your business, missing destinations and deadlines. In some sectors, such as health or search and rescue, it can even lead to injury or loss of life. With the consequences of lost visibility in mind, take a look at your organisation's dashboards (if they exist!). Ask yourself—are they as easy to understand as the dashboard of a car?
Most organisations would reply 'no' to that question. All too often, dashboards exist because the organisation's monitoring solution provided one out-of-the-box. That's fine if your intended audience is all technically inclined, and understand what it means when there is a 'memory bottleneck' or the 'committed memory in use is too high'. These alerts, however, might mean nothing to upper management or the executive team, who are directly responsible for approving your team's budget. Action needs to be taken to translate the information, so that it is accessible to all your key decision-makers. So what are the first steps?
Here are three initial items to consider:
- Context is everything! Without context, your executive team may not understand the impact of an under-resourced ESX server that's beginning to fail. If, however, your dashboard were to show that the ESX server happens to host the core income stream systems for the organisation, you may have their attention (and funding).
- Visualise the data! Approximately 60% of the world population are visual thinkers, so your dashboard should be visually designed. Find a way to visualise your data. Show the relationships and dependencies between systems. Oh, and "death to pie charts!".
- Invest the time and effort! Find your creative spark, and brainstorm as a team. A well-designed dashboard will pay on-going dividends with every incident managed, or business case written. Make sure you allot time to prove your work against SLAs.
If you need help with dashboard development or design, give JDS a call on 1300 780 432Â and speak with one of our friendly consultants.
Our team on the case
Length of Time at JDS
10 years
Skills
HP Certified Instructor, HP Business Service Management, HP LoadRunner, Splunk Sales Engineer, Certified in Service Now.
Workplace Passion
I am a big advocate for the value provided by Synthetic Business Process monitoring. When I first saw it 10 years ago in HP Business Availability Center I was impressed and I am still touting the benefits after all this time. Time and time again, I have seen it provide invaluable visibility into the user experience. These days it can be achieved using trendy newer tools such as Splunk for a fraction of the price it previously cost.
Tech tips from JDS

Browser Console
Read More

Glide Variables
Read More

Understanding Database Indexes in ServiceNow
Read More

Fast-track ServiceNow upgrades with Automated Testing Framework (ATF)
Read More

Read More

Splunk .conf18
Read More

ServiceNow Catalog Client Scripts: G_Form Clear Values
Read More

Is DevPerfOps a thing?
Read More

The benefits of performance testing with LoadRunner
Read More

Monitoring Atlassian Suite with AppDynamics
Read More

5 quick tips for customising your SAP data in Splunk
Read More

How to maintain versatility throughout your SAP lifecycle
Read More

How to revitalise your performance testing in SAP
Read More

Reserve and import data through Micro Focus ALM
Read More

How to effectively manage your CMDB in ServiceNow
Read More

ServiceNow and single sign-on
Read More

How to customise the ServiceNow Service Portal
Read More

Integrating a hand-signed signature to an Incident Form in ServiceNow
Read More

Integrating OMi (Operations Manager i) with ServiceNow
Read More

Implementing an electronic signature in ALM
Read More

Service portal simplicity
Read More

Learning from real-world cloud security crises
Read More

Static Variables and Pointers in ServiceNow
Read More

Citrix and web client engagement on an Enterprise system
Read More

Understanding outbound web services in ServiceNow
Read More

How to solve SSL 3 recording issues in HPE VuGen
Read More

How to record Angular JS Single Page Applications (SPA)
Read More

Calculating Pacing for Performance Tests
Read More

Vugen and GitHub Integration
Read More

What’s new in LoadRunner 12.53
Read More

Filtered Reference Fields in ServiceNow
Read More

ServiceNow performance testing tips
Read More

Monitor Dell Foglight Topology Churn with Splunk
Read More

Straight-Through Processing with ServiceNow
Read More

Splunk: Using Regex to Simplify Your Data
Read More

ServiceNow Choice List Dependencies
Read More

Tips for replaying RDP VuGen scripts in BSM or LoadRunner
Read More

Incorporating iSPI metric reports into MyBSM dashboard pages
Read More

Using SV contexts to simulate stored data
Read More

What’s new in LoadRunner 12.02
Read More

Recycle Bin for Quality Center
Read More

LoadRunner Correlation with web_reg_save_param_regexp
Read More

LoadRunner 11.52
Read More

QC for Testers – Quiz
Read More

Agile Performance Tuning with HP Diagnostics
Read More

What’s new in HP Service Virtualization 2.30
Read More

Understanding LoadRunner Virtual User Days (VUDs)
Read More

Problems recording HTTPS with VuGen
Read More

Improving the management and efficiency of QTP execution
Read More

Performance testing Oracle WebCenter with LoadRunner
Read More

Generating custom reports with Quality Center OTA using Python
Read More

Asynchronous Communication: Scripting For Cognos
Read More

How to fix common VuGen recording problems
Read More

Monitoring Active Directory accounts with HP BAC
Read More

URL Attachments in Quality Center
Read More

What’s new in LoadRunner 11.00?
Read More

Restore old License Usage stats after upgrading Quality Center
Read More

Changing LoadRunner/VuGen log options at runtime
Read More

Restricting large attachments in Quality Center
Read More

Retrieving Quality Center user login statistics
Read More

A comparison of open source load testing tools
...
Read More

Worst practices in performance testing
Read More

LoadRunner Sales Questions
Read More

LoadRunner Analysis: Hints and tips
Read More

LoadRunner in Windows 7
HP Loadrunner 11 is now available. This new version now natively supports Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. I ...
Read More

Using the QuickTest Professional “commuter” license
Read More

Installing HP Diagnostics
Read More

Understanding LoadRunner licensing
Read More

VuGen scripting for YouTube video
Read More

Creating a Web + MMS vuser
Read More

Why you should use backwards dates
Read More

How to get the host’s IP address from within VuGen
Read More

VuGen scripting for BMC Remedy Action Request System 7.1
Read More

Unique usernames for BPM scripts
Read More

Mapping drives for LoadRunner Windows monitoring
Read More

VuGen feature requests
Read More

LoadRunner script completion checklist
Read More

Querying Quality Center user roles
Read More

Querying the Quality Center Database
Read More

HPSU 2009 Presentation – Performance Testing Web 2.0
Read More

Scaling HP Diagnostics
Read More

Global variables aren’t really global in LoadRunner
Read More

Client-side certificates for VuGen
Read More

Detect malicious HTML/JavaScript payloads with WebInspect (e.g. ASPROX, Gumblar, Income Iframe)
Read More

VuGen code snippets
Read More

Integrating QTP with Terminal Emulators
Read More

Why you must add try/catch blocks to Java-based BPM scripts
Read More

Querying a MySQL database with LoadRunner
Read More

ANZTB 2009 Presentation: Performance Testing Web 2.0
Read More

How to make QTP “analog mode” steps more reliable
Read More

Testing multiple browsers in a Standardized Operating Environment (SOE)
Read More

DNS-based load balancing for virtual users
Read More

What’s new in LoadRunner 9.50?
Read More

Calculating the difference between two dates or timestamps
Read More

The “is it done yet” loop
Read More

Think time that cannot be ignored
Read More

Understanding aggregate variance within LoadRunner analysis
Read More

Load balancing vusers without a load balancer
Read More

Harvesting file names with VuGen
Read More

Parameterising Unix/Posix timestamps in VuGen
Read More

HP Software trial license periods
Read More

How to handle HTTP POSTs with a changing number of name-value pairs
Read More

VuGen string comparison behaviour
Read More

Persistent data in VuGen with MySQL
Read More

How to write a Performance Test Plan
Read More

Unable to add virtual machine
To get ...
Read More

LoadRunner scripting languages
Read More

WDiff replacement for VuGen
Read More

Testing web services with a standard Web Vuser
Read More

Why your BPM scripts should use Download Filters
Read More

Querying your web server logs
Read More

Importing IIS Logs into SQL Server
Read More

QTP “Uninstall was not completed” problem
Read More

VuGen correlation for SAP Web Dynpro
Read More

How to save $500 on your HP software license
Read More

Testing and monitoring acronyms
Read More

Solving VuGen script generation errors
Read More

An introduction to SiteScope EMS Topology
Read More

Using the BAC JMX Console
Read More