Custom Dashboards for Operations and Engineering
Engineering and operations teams have a longstanding tradition of enhancing vendor-provided management tools with custom-built solutions. The emergence of robust dashboarding tools like Grafana and Kibana, as well as efficient, scalable and secure time series database applications such as Prometheus and InfluxDB, coupled with well-structured APIs from vendors, has significantly reduced the cost and increased the security of these custom efforts. However, internal development always carries costs related to effort, maintainability, and the risk of key individuals leaving, often making commercially developed visibility tools more attractive.
Our Custom Dashboard Project
Recently, we embarked on a project to develop a custom dashboard during a migration of nearly 1,000 SD-WAN sites. Following the migration, we provided operational ownership before handing over the sites to the customer’s managed service team. The decision to create a custom dashboard was influenced by several key factors:
1. Vendor Solution Limitations: The vendor offered a sophisticated visibility solution. There were gaps in alarm correlation and information display that justified a custom approach given the project’s scale.
2. Qualified Team: Our NetOps team is highly skilled in both networking and software engineering, providing a strong foundation for developing a custom solution. We also have top-tier SD-WAN solution architects who can define both correlation rules and the most useful display outputs.
3. API Familiarity: Working extensively with the vendor’s API was beneficial as we frequently assist with integration into OSS solutions like ServiceNow.
Success and Considerations
We are thrilled with the performance of our custom dashboard, which is now operating seamlessly on a production network.
Before undertaking a similar project, consider the following questions:
1. Internal Skills: Do we have the necessary internal expertise to both specify the desired outputs, choose the toolset and develop the solution?
2. Tools Gap and Scalability Requirement: Is there a significant gap in the tools we have already purchased? How long is this gap likely to persist, and does it justify the development effort?
3. Development Costs: What would be the cost of developing the solution externally? Obtaining a quote from a skilled third party can provide insight into the opportunity cost of using internal resources.
By carefully evaluating these factors, you can make a more informed decision about whether to develop custom dashboards or rely on commercial solutions.
