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When you create a new product, one of the most important problems is how to design a good user interface. In many cases the solution of this problem becomes a key factor in the overall product success or failure.

The experience shows that it is hardly possible to design an “ideal” user interface that would be most convenient for all possible tasks the users will want to perform with help of the product. Therefore you should probably concentrate on the most common use cases. If we imagine an average user and try to measure all the time he or she uses a product and then try to classify that time by different use cases, we will find out that 90% of that time is covered by several major ones. So, the goal is to create such interface that would be optimal for these major use cases. That is what we tried to do.

We think that in our case these use cases are:

• Quickly get an overview of all the resources to identify possible problems.
• Analyze various parameters of the monitored resources over any selected time period in order to investigate the source of the problem.
• Check that everything is working fine once the problem is resolved.

We also had some general requirements for the user interface. It should have been designed to be accessible remotely via web to let users check and configure anything from any location. We also wanted it to be fast, easy-to-use, and good-looking (after all, we were going to sell the product, so we wanted to provide really good impression on people). That is why we chose Flash technology.

The screen shot below shows how it is organized in general.

You can switch between several tabs using the buttons on the left of the window. The most important tab is where you can see all the monitors. They are gathered to groups, so that it would be more convenient to manage them. For example, you can group monitors related to the same server. Visually each group can be expanded or collapsed.

Each entry in the list of monitors shows basic parameters of that monitor and the statistics for the last 24 hours in form of a bar painted in green, yellow and red (like a small colored graph).

You can select a monitor in the list and see more detailed statistics for it in the right view. This will let you perform deeper analysis. You can select different time periods and get any information that is required to analyze the work of that monitor.

At the top of the window there is a consolidated view that shows very basic parameters of the whole monitoring system, including the current number of monitors in each of three states and 24 hours history for all monitors.

We believe that such approach provides a view of all the monitored resources in a comprehensive form and at the same time lets users quickly get to any level of details.