New RHQ Groups Summary/Activity pages.. thoughts?

Simeon Pinder spinder at redhat.com
Fri Feb 18 14:35:00 UTC 2011


Thanks to all who replied with comments/feedback.  There was a lot of good feedback about how the data display and aggregation should be improved.  Instead of replying to each of the responses, I'll attempt to corral the current feedback and classify into 

i)This sprint: addressing this sprint
ii)Possible enhancement soon: attempt to address in this or later sprints
iii)Unlikely for now: unable to address in the short term. 

These classifications do not necessarily reflect the final word but are based on: 
a)my assessment of what is possible given the development cycles I have left devoted for this sprint 
b)assessment of overall development difficulty of implementing the requested feature given the current architecture

This means that your continued feedback could adjust the implementation complexity in or out of a proposed feature.

Important Customer Feedback[Andreas Dietrich]:
"Because RHQ is only there to notice, track down and recover problematic resources", RHQ-setup and -cleanup are necessary evils that should be kept minimal. The real work (~95% of the time) should be spent on the problematic resource or some related one itself ... db setup/recovery, router, firewalls, os setup, application changes/restarts etc."

Scope: discussion of Activity page for RHQ Groups

In general the overarching theme of the feedback centered around how the Group activity pages were now a 'Dashboard' or 'Control Center' view of aggregated resources(primarily RHQ compatible groups).  While the 'Control View' of a Resource is fairly straight forward, the 'Control View' of a compatible group is much more flexible and is defined by the purpose of the grouping.  In other words if I'm grouping AS instances and I only care about Critical Alerts then it's less useful to have five Low priority alerts displayed in the summary area simply because they occurred more recently. Or alternatively if I've defined a group around availability monitoring then group member availability hierarchy is more interesting than the data in OOB/Config changes/operations/etc or the screen real estate needed to display them.  In short, Group Activity pages would be significantly more useful if one could customize/tune what and how the results are filtered.      

This Sprint:
 - Compatible groups activity pages similar to Resource>Activity as applicable. 
  > - Recent Metrics (displaying sparklines and recent data points)
  > - Recent Alerts (five most recent)
  > - Recent Out of Bound Metrics (five most recent)
  > - Recent Configuration Updates (five most recent)
  > - Recent Operations (five most recent)
  > - Recent Event Counts (severity + counts for last 24 hrs)
  > - Recent Package History (five most recent)
 - (Group and Resource)>Activity page refresh options
 - Group Activity displays "see more..." links for access to the full results of underlying activity queries  

Possible enhancement soon:
 - Group activity dashboard: ability to reconstruct the Group>Activity pages by reusing the current RHQ GWT Dashboard functionality to provide user specific group configuration options much like the dashboard customization functionality today.  This will provide a high level of reuse and customization that may address many of the concerns of data display customizations that were described and requested in the included feedback below and in the related threads.  This is currently being investigated as a good general solution to the Group>Activity.


Unlikely for now:
 - Customizable Tab order/level changes in Inventory view(Think customer deciding to move and show Alert History instead of Summary view per resource).  While this is a cool idea the UI changes and potential for regression is non-trivial at this time.
 - Customizable Mouse preferences order, level per resource per user.  This is also cool for customizing the UI for customer that heavily use certain sections, but should more aptly be addressed along with the previous user customizable task as well.
 - Customizable Auto acknowledgement or deletion rules for Alerts displayed for group members. Another cool idea and perhaps some of this is currently addressable by CLI, but this is also out of scope for this current group work.  The customizable 'group activity dashboard' work may help address some of these concerns before we're able to address this directly.
 - Customized, hierarchical multi-level display of resources with alerts/availability ideally with color coding. This type of display fulfills a very specific customer need to be done right.  For the Group Activity page this level of detail is not possible without excluding other activity regions to free up display room.  Look to the continued discussion about 'group activity dashboard' for likely solutions/enhancements related to this request.   
 - Groups being able to inherit/share Alert Definitions.  This requires further analysis to determine applicability of use cases for the wider customer base.  Currently out of scope.


More to come.

References:
https://fedorahosted.org/pipermail/rhq-devel/2011-February/000584.html Original RHQ Group Activity post
https://fedorahosted.org/pipermail/rhq-devel/2010-November/000442.html Tab reordering
https://fedorahosted.org/pipermail/rhq-devel/2010-November/000402.html Numerous feedback points
https://fedorahosted.org/pipermail/rhq-devel/2011-February/000592.html Page refresh  

-Simeon

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Simeon Pinder" <spinder at redhat.com>
> To: "rhq-devel" <rhq-devel at lists.fedorahosted.org>
> Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2011 3:57:52 PM
> Subject: New RHQ Groups Summary/Activity pages.. thoughts?
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm looking for feedback on what the contents of the Groups
> Summary/Activity pages should contain.
> 
> Note:
> *Resource ->Summary pages renamed to Resource->Activity
> *Group had no Summary page, just defaulted to metrics view.
> 
> in RHQ 3, the related Resource Summary/Activity pages displayed the
> following snapshot for the specific resource selected:
> - Recent Metrics (displaying sparklines and recent data points)
> - Recent Alerts (five most recent)
> - Recent Out of Bound Metrics (five most recent)
> - Recent Configuration Updates (five most recent)
> - Recent Operations (five most recent)
> - Recent Event Counts (severity + counts for last 24 hrs)
> - Recent Package History (five most recent)
> 
> in RHQ 4, we're adding the Summary/Activity page for Groups. My
> initial thoughts were to list the following for each group/autogroup:
> - Recent Metrics (displaying sparklines and recent metric data points)
> - Recent Alerts (five most recent) but with "More.." links for user to
> view full query results spanning N resources.
> - Recent Configuration Updates (five most recent to display in
> process)
> - Recent Operations (five most recent operations,include started
> operations as well)
> - Recent Event Counts (severity + counts for last 24 hrs for only
> higher severity counts displayed)
> - Recent Package History (five most recent across group both created
> and updated)
> *The 'Recent Package History' has no current group support in SLSBs.
> Some work here to aggregate.
> *How does this play with our decision to direct people to use Bundles
> instead of manual deploy package updates?
> - Recent Out of Bound Metrics (five most recent)
> *The 'Recent Out of Bound Metrics' has no current group support in
> SLSBs. Some work here to aggregate. Still worth it? Long standing
> issue with correct OOB usage for resources. Multiply problem for
> groups?
> 
> Given the dashboard like nature of the Activity panel now, should we
> consider adding:
> i)ActivityView page refresh button for whole page? Individual refresh
> options for each section?
> ii)Logic to automatically refresh the ActivityView sections every 20
> seconds? Refresh round robin?
> 
> Should we add some 'Bundle Operations' section to the Group Activity
> page for Platform groups?
> 
> -Simeon
> 
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