Vistaprint 'Dagger'
Live Production Monitoring Tools
Live Production Monitoring Tools
As a Problem Manager at Vistaprint, I was charged with ensuring that live production systems were operating properly at all times. There is nothing like being in the dark to make you realize how crucial it is to have information you can quickly assess and react on.
While we had traditional monitoring tools in place that would report on the general health of our servers (accessibility, Windows stability, etc.), we had nothing to tell us if the Vistaprint platform itself worked adequately, letting people browse the website, register, design and save documents and place orders.
Using a combination of JavaScript, ASP (and SQL Server procedures), and Office Web Components, I went all out, providing more than a simple Green/Red flag indicator, but live charting of KPIs with statistical indexes that would allow us to detect problematic trends way ahead of the game and react accordingly.
'Order View' and 'Dagger' (actually, only 1 'g': Daily Activity Graphs & Error Reporting) became staples of our daily monitoring process, and early ancestors of future Vistaprint live reporting dashboards.
Many of those tools would be installed on the Windows Active Desktop of all IT and Problem Management personnel (and much everybody in Marketing, at a time when their reporting was merely a delayed operation using Excel spreadsheets). Those dashboards, and new ones with a similar flavor are still in use today, sprawling the monitors of the Vistaprint Production Control Center.
And to my knowledge, Obi Wan Kenobi still comes 'round to tell us 'Everything is fine'. The long life of an internal joke...!
While we had traditional monitoring tools in place that would report on the general health of our servers (accessibility, Windows stability, etc.), we had nothing to tell us if the Vistaprint platform itself worked adequately, letting people browse the website, register, design and save documents and place orders.
Using a combination of JavaScript, ASP (and SQL Server procedures), and Office Web Components, I went all out, providing more than a simple Green/Red flag indicator, but live charting of KPIs with statistical indexes that would allow us to detect problematic trends way ahead of the game and react accordingly.
'Order View' and 'Dagger' (actually, only 1 'g': Daily Activity Graphs & Error Reporting) became staples of our daily monitoring process, and early ancestors of future Vistaprint live reporting dashboards.
Many of those tools would be installed on the Windows Active Desktop of all IT and Problem Management personnel (and much everybody in Marketing, at a time when their reporting was merely a delayed operation using Excel spreadsheets). Those dashboards, and new ones with a similar flavor are still in use today, sprawling the monitors of the Vistaprint Production Control Center.
And to my knowledge, Obi Wan Kenobi still comes 'round to tell us 'Everything is fine'. The long life of an internal joke...!
