Earlier this week you may have read, “Incident playback,” a post about storing the context around incidents and being able to learn and refine responses using that context.
Today I’d like to take the concept a little further.
When talking about context, I wasn’t just referring to other live alarms, but also having data feeds such as performance metrics (eg CPU utilisation), change windows (with linkages to change management tickets / documents) and any other useful data streams that could be presented on a timeline.
Taking the playback concept and then projecting into the future, the tool could become invaluable as a scenario and network planning tool. It could use data such as capacity threshold analysis on a given area of network and predict capacity exhaustion and identify network design weaknesses in certain scenarios.
I’d see this tool presented across at least three panes:
- A geospatial pane (or logical network map) showing capacities and alarms;
- A data log pane, similar to an alarm list showing details relating to the selected device or devices; but most importantly
- A timeline control pane, allowing the operator to play forward, pause, back, etc just like a movie player
Sounds like a big challenge to create. Do you think the benefits would likely outweigh the effort? Would such a tool be useful in your environment/s?