A single glass of pain or single pane of glass??

Is your OSS a single pane of glass, or a single glass of pain?

You can tell I’m being a little flippant here. People often (perhaps idealistically) talk about OSS as being the single pane of glass (SPOG) to manage a network.

I say “idealistically” for a couple of reasons:

  1. There are usually many personas who interact with an OSS, each with vastly different user interface (UI) needs
  2. There is usually more than one OSS product in a client’s OSS suite, often from different vendors, with varying levels of integration

Where a single pane of glass can be a true ambition is as a consolidated health-status dashboard / portal, Invariably, this portal is used by executive / leader / manager personas who want to quickly see a single-screen health status that covers all networks and/or parts of the OSS suite. When things go wrong, this portal becomes the single glass of pain.

These single panes tend to be heavily customised for each organisation as every one has a unique set of metrics-that-matter. For those designing these panes, the key is to not just include vanity metrics, but to show information that the leader can action.

But the interesting perspective here is whether the single glass of pain is even relevant within your organisation’s culture. It’s just my opinion, but I prefer for coal-face workers to be empowered to make rapid recovery actions rather than requiring direction from up high in the org-chart. Coal-face workers generally have different tools with UIs that *should* help them monitor, manage and repair super-efficiently.

To get back to the “idealistic” comment above, each OSS UI needs to be fit-for-purpose for each unique persona (eg designers, product owners, network operations, etc). To me this implies that there is no single pane of glass…

I should caveat that by citing the example of an OSS search interface, something I’ve yet to see in OSS… although that’s just a front end to dozens of persona-specific panes of glass.

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