Custom Visualizations

Tideway Foundation's visualizations are a powerful tool when trying to understand highly interconnected systems. Foundation's datastore contains nodes (e.g. servers, software components and application owners) and dependencies between those nodes (e.g. 'software runs on', 'virtual machine contained by' or 'business application owned by') - and can be extended to include your own custom node and dependency types. Foundation is able to automatically draw graph structures - not just tree structures - based upon the nodes and dependencies in its datastore. However, without the ability to control those visualizations, they can rapidly become cluttered, and difficult to decipher.

Foundation's visualizations can be customized to show only the node and dependency types that matter to the problem you're solving. Dependency types can be defined as multiple traversals chained together to get from one node type to another. Removing extraneous information from the visualization can make the answers you're looking for crystal clear.

You can find out more about customizing Tideway Foundation visualizations here

Searching the Data Center Graph

Data centers fundementally consist of a large number of nodes (servers, switches, software components, etc.) with rapidly changing configurations, and complex interrelationships between them. This kind of highly interconnected data structure is known as a graph. Relational databases are not designed for storing graphs, and although almost anything can be modeled as a set of relational tables, the SQL queries needed to traverse the interconnected data quickly become extremely cumbersome and inefficient.

Foundation's data store natively represents the graph structure, and provides a query language designed for traversing the graph structure, meaning that it is much more convenient to use, and more efficient at manipulating data within the graph.

Tideway Foundation Search Queries are the basis for creating reports, charts, dashboards, and for flattening data for export to third party systems.

You can find out more about Tideway Foundation Search Queries, and how to write you own here

Custom Reports and Charts

Reports are one of the primary methods of navigating data within Tideway Foundation, and provide the ability to quickly drill down to the detail of individual nodes when necessary. Charts can also be created directly from any report by clicking on the chart icon on the column headers. Finally - context sensitive reports can be attached to node types (e.g. 'show me host processe count over time'), proving quick access though drop-down menus.

Reports are based upon the output of Tideway Foundation Search Queries - so it is possible to generate custom reports that are as simple or complex as needed. The custom reports and charts that make up your Tideway Foundation Application can be grouped together into channels - making it easy to find them in the user interface. You can find out more about creating custom reports here

Creating the Management View

Dashboards provide a quick and easy way to get an overview of the metrics important to your Tideway Foundation Application. Dashboards can show, for example, multiple statistics for your Oracle database estate, or VMware server roll-out.

Once you've defined your channels, and the associated reports or charts, dashboards are easy to create and edit, and are shared amoung all users of Tideway Foundation.

You can find out more about creating your own dashboards here

Modeling Things Your Way

Template-based discovery solutions are too rigid and simplistic for today’s rapidly changing IT infrastructures. Tideway Foundation™ uses 'patterns' created in the simple but powerful 'Tideway Pattern Language' or TPL for short. Patterns can distinguish everything from the simplest running software process to the most complex business applications imaginable.

Patterns naturally capture a sequence of discovery steps that branch intelligently according to need. Patterns are able to run commands, interrogate files and perform registry, WMI or XPath queries to obtain detailed configuration information - information which then guides subsequent steps of the discovery process. Patterns ensure that Foundation adapts easily to new technologies without changes to the core code.

This flexibility allows you to build patterns to recognize home-grown software and business applications. Patterns can also be used to codify:

• Policies
• Standard/Gold Builds
• Prohibited Configurations