The Widgets are Coming!

Now for something totally different: Widgets!

What are widgets? Generically speaking, they're small mini-applets that run on your desktop or in a dashboard-type page or view. In the case of the exo.performance.network, widgets are small slices of functionality that have been broken-out from the main Analysis Portal site and presented as a stand-alone UI for a specific data type.

For example, we're working on a Systems Health widget that uses the Portal site's Report Card engine to generate daily and weekly summary charts of a system's overall CPU, Memory and I/O health. Here's a screenshot of the widget in action:

Figure 1 - The Systems Health Widget

We've also built a Process Monitoring widget that lets you keep track of collected metrics data for a specific process on a specific system. Here's a quick look at the widget monitoring SQL Server CPU utilization over a one week period:

Figure 2 - The Process Monitor Widget

Our goal is to produce a whole library of similarly styled widgets, each with a specific function that exposes part of the Portal's tools set. We'll likely offer these together as a kind of "roll-your-own-dashboard" kit where you can point and click your way to the ideal combination of charts and gauges.

And as always, we welcome your feedback. Tell us what you'd like to see in an "exo.widget" library and we'll see what we can cook-up together! :-)