The last days I have been looking in to Savision LiveMaps, thought I share some of my thoughts on the product.

My two cents

Maps

So the product is named LiveMaps, it should be good at doing maps… is it? Well, I havn’t seen any product with tight OpsMgr integration that does it better.
You can set almost any picture as a background (vector-based is preferred since they scale up/down best) and then you just drag n’ drop object from OpsMgr on to the map.
A nice feature is that you can create membership rules for every map, so if you are creating a map of a part of your network you can set rules to include every object named XYZ, have an IP-adress of 1.2.3.*… if you are know how to create a group in OpsMgr, it’s basicly the same… with all the options.

Application

Most of the things you can do on application monitoring you can do with OpsMgr Distributed Applications. The best part with doing it in LiveMaps is the placing of objects. In OpsMgr you can’t select that you want to place your database on spot X and service on spot Y. When doing this kind of applications in LiveMaps you can easily set an exact spot for you object and then if you want add an small image, colored box or something nice to give it some more bling.

Network Topologies

When creating network topologies for a large network you should probably use Jalasoft XianIo as well. Today, with a plain vanilla OpsMgr you can’t autocreate relations between devices. So if you have a large network, this will take time… loads of time.
I hope that Savision will post some information on how we can use this to create relations in our own environments without the need of third party products, even with XianIO there are SNMP-enabled devices that XianIO doesn’t cover…

Take a look at this YouTube video: and you understand why you should look in to XianIO Today.

Dashboards

Together with maps, this is the easy way to get project-fundings.
Starting with a map or distributed application, just drag and drop your objects and within seconds you have the dashboard your CIO always wanted. “Economy App – Green”, “HR App – Yellow”, “Mail – Green”… easy to set up, easy to understand.

Notes, suggestions and general thoughts to Savision

Live Maps in OpsMgr

When using large maps it’s hard (well, not hard… just to many clicks) to zoom in/out and then pan around.

Some easier way (than this blogpost) to control the health rollup.
For a OpsMgr admin this shouldn’t be a problem… but we are aiming on having network guys draw the maps and relations between network equipment.

Authoring Console

Where is the export/import button? I want to create my maps in test/dev, export them and then import them to production. Ok, I understand that you need the refering objects GUID when you import a map…
…what if you make it like this: When you export a map you don’t save GUID, instead you save the name of the object. Then, when you import the object you get a wizard that alows you to map saved names against the real object in the new environment.

A “replace this object”-Icon would be nice. When creating larger overviews (say country) I start out by creating the easy dynamic lists for the tier 2 maps (say city). Then, when I have the right amount of information, a background map and so on, I want to replace the dynamic list with a nice map for that city. But today you will loose all connections from and to that city-object on the country map. So… a replace button would be nice.

Missing a global option to set different (default) Sate-icons. I would like to have one for every object with Class X or Class Y.
For instance I want to create Server-icons, Network device-icons and so on. With that option you can remove the image and only use stateicon to describe the equipment.

Missing the option to place the State Icon in the center of the image.

Option to mark the Visible-flag on/off for a folder instead of separate maps.
I know that you can do this by creating a OpsMgr User Role and scope that one… When you have the option for every map/list, why not on folders?

Web

I want to be able to create a Web-url without alerts and the right-click menu, only icons.

An option to grant anonymous access to a single drawing. Say that you want to do a dashboard with your larger applications and publish it on the intranet…

Is it possible to integrate tighter with the OpsMgr Web Console, you do not want to have two consoles for one monitoring solution. Yes, I know that you can work around that by linking in the weburl… It works but it isn’t the nice way to do it.

And please, give some basic support for users not using MSIE.

Licensemodel

How about test/dev-environments? Today the licenses is based on MgmtGroups and most of us have a separate test/dev environment. Ok, you can use the free version but it’s limited to 5 maps and I want my dev environment to reflect the production environment.

Information / Relations

I have been in contact with Savision support, I wanted to know how I can enable the automagic relations-button. Got an answer and they will look in to it.
I want to discover hardware devices, SAN-Switches for instance, how nice wouldn’t it be if LiveMaps could draw the relations to servers for me?