Maybe this comes from the time when I was handling another kind of dashboard, from which my life was directly depending!
Dashboards are great because they present a synthetic view of a situation in a form that is visually expressive and does not require a lot of concentrated attention to capture relevant and crucial information.
The most recent dashboard I built exposes particular aspects of several instances of Mule ESB I have under my control. Through JMX, Mule exposes a wealth of statistics about the different components of a particular instance. Here is a small portion of the HTML console that displays this information:
This is too much information the brain, or at least my brain, can digest efficiently and quickly enough. Hence I created a simplified view that represents the variations of message routing statistics on a selection of components:
The components are simply selected by name: I decided to prefix the important ones with "process" and "dispatch" and derived from there a simple selection pattern. I use different colors to show different states:
- Green: no activity,
- Yellow: at least one message went through,
- Orange: the backing event queue has been resized up,
- Red: an error has been routed,
- Gray: no delta available (first call of the dashboard),
- Black: component statistics unavailable.
Of course, this does not compare to the professional grade monitoring tools you can buy from MuleSource, but is already handy for deployments of limited scope and criticality.
I think the most interesting aspect of this dashboard is how quickly you can develop the ability to recognize a normal behavior pattern from a faulty one. It is pretty much like reading the matrix undecoded... Now how could you get bored from such a board!
UPDATE 03-MAY-2008: This dashboard is now available on MuleForge.
