With today’s blog, I want to do two things for my customers: the first being to remind you that any custom report filters you create can be imported into MyView.
Secondly, once you import that report into MyView, how to hack the bejeezus out of it to get what display you’d like.
Let me explain…
NetFlow monitoring applications are like cars. It’s important to have a good engine and a strong body to make sure it can get you to where you need to go and can stand the test of time. But if the steering wheel is in the wrong place and the clutch keeps dying every 2,000 miles, then the best engine in the world won’t matter. Like a top of the line BMW, our goal is to provide the best of both worlds; a strong, durable core, with aesthetics that make using our NetFlow analysis software an enjoyable experience.
Last week you read about five new features set to be included in the upcoming release of Scrutinizer version 7. Nathan got our blog preview series started by talking about, encryption exclusions, more flows, collector improvements, group permissions for users and proxy server configuration. This week, I have five more new features for you that are certain to whet your appetite for more network traffic analysis goodness from Scrutinizer v7.
Since nearly the start of my career I’ve been hearing from customers that they want some sort of summary view for the helpdesk or Network Operations Center . Typically I ask “what should we put in it” and usually I hear things like “summary information”, other times I get a few more details like “devices that are having performance problems, failed devices, alarms, etc. you know stuff like that.”
The truth is many of us aren’t sure about what we want to see, but feel fairly confident that we’ll know it when we see it. It can be tough to build an interface around limited information. We set out to do this with MyView, which is a form of ‘mashup’ as described by the Gartner Group.
“By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through coarse-grained application mashups.”
Our office has two 48-inch LCDs hanging from the ceiling and each displays a unique MyView. One side displays the sales team and the other the support team. Here is what we see:
You can see in the upper right hand corner that I am definitely slacking today. I’ve been on the phone today for 20 minutes for only four calls and I put only one note into our CRM. You can click on the numbers and bring up details of the actual calls I made.
I can see that Jay isn’t at his desk as shown via the webcam at our remote office. I hope we don’t get in trouble! In the lower right are the busiest Cisco NetFlow- and sFlow-capable interfaces on our network. Notice that all are currently under utilized.
My point is that we are looking at what we want to see in our call center. This is because the MyView interface in Scrutinizer is completely customizable and can include third-party applications. It is very simple to create your own gadgets. We include dozens of gadgets for things such as alarms, VoIP, network mapping, etc. Call us if you need help getting started.
You can see a brief clip of our LCDs at the end of the D.C. Douglas video.
Have fun.
Michael Patterson
