

Stack Exchange's Really Big Monitor Setup - alexlmiller
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/12/the-stack-big-board/

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bigohms
I kinda expected more from a group hosting millions of conversations a year
and undisclosed$$ derived from it. Think bigger, like Visa's NOC big...

<http://images.fastcompany.com/upload/visa-headquarters.jpg>

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m0nastic
I used to design and build NOCS as a network management consultant, and we
found one thing to be universally true at every NOC we designed:

1.) Even though the person who hired us fell in love with the set of NORAD
from the movie Wargames with walls of giant monitors, not one of the NOC
analysts sitting at their desks ever once looked up at the big screen (unless
it was late at night and they replaced the network map with a first-person
shooter) to do their job. They always look at the event viewer at their desk.

The big wall of screens is purely to impress customers/investors during
visits.

~~~
wizard_2
I currently work at a NOC. We've built a pretty nice setup to do our jobs
(mostly software) but I've got no idea what others do. As for hardware, I
don't know how I could use more then 3 or 4 screens or how the team could use
a big one.

(Though we do want one but only because they're cool.)

I'd love to hear some war stories and see how you work with other teams.

~~~
m0nastic
edit: I typed this on my phone while waiting at the airport, so it's a little
looser grammatically than I'd like.

I've been out of the network management space for about a decade, but
ostensibly the big screen was pitched as a way to look at overall network
health or identify a large-scale outage. There'd be a big-ass network topology
map that would suddenly start showing red dots.

For the big topology map, that was usually done using Spectrum or Openview
Network Node Manager (the only use we had for NNM for that matter, it sucked
at everything else).

The reason I said "ostensibly" though, is because if you're relying on
noticing red dots appear on the map to tell there's an outage, it means you
aren't doing proper event correlation.

Most systems we built focused on the event viewer (Netcool for the most part,
but it was just for deduplication as it didn't do actual correlation); so
that's what would generally be on screen for an analyst. Their other screen
would have their ticketing system (usually Remedy, but occasionally Vantive,
which I vastly preferred).

The actual correlation engine was Nervecenter for the most part (which was a
consultants dream as it took like 6 months to build all the rules), although
we tried out a bunch of the "code book"-based correlation engines (SMARTS I
believe was the name of one of the more egregious ones).

I worked on one project to build a NOC for Raytheon that 6 months into it they
decided to make the whole thing automated (as in, not have any analysts
actually working in the NOC) and that was interesting. We ended up having to
write logic to handle all the notifications and queuing.

Like I said though, all of this was the Cretacious period for network
management, so I really hope things have gotten better in the interim.

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absconditus
This sort of thing was popular during the dot-com boom.

~~~
brendn
While you're clearly implying that this is an indicator of a second tech
bubble, you're using faulty logic to arrive at that conclusion. Computers were
also popular during the dot-com boom. So was the Internet. That doesn't mean
that a focus on internet computing caused the bubble, or even indicated it.

If you want to say that this is a managerial dashboard wankfest that may
indicate a company more obsessed with metrics than with building a great
product, just say it.

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zokier
Why 3x580 instead of a single eyefinity Radeon? Would seem like a obvious
choice for such project.

~~~
sp332
Since you don't need 3D acceleration, maybe a single Matrox card would be more
appropriate. e.g. One of these
[http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/graphics_cards/m_...](http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/graphics_cards/m_series/m9188pciex16/)
can drive 8 monitors.

Edit: whoops, didn't notice it was $$$$.

~~~
reitzensteinm
I don't know - when a $290 Radeon can drive 6 monitors per card (with enough
acceleration to draw basic 3D on each), is there really a place for Matrox any
more? The card you linked is $1800.

I know either is a small fraction of the cost of the overall device, but you'd
still want some kind of benefit for the price increase.

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121431)

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smackfu
Odd that half the screens have couch-style content and half have desktop-style
content.

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michaelbuckbee
It looks like they took at least a little inspiration from Panic's Status
Board: <http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/>

~~~
gecko
While we borrowed incredibly heavily from Panic's design at Fog Creek, I think
StackExchange's is an example of parallel evolution more than anything else at
this point. Panic built an absolutely _beautiful_ board, but the idea of a
board didn't originate with them, nor is there much overlap between
StackExchange's and theirs.

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bproper
Spolsky's interview technique here is flawless

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sgrove
I was thinking they were using Leftronic for their dashboard, but looks like
they say it's Geckoboard. Interesting how there's a convergence around how
dashboards look - I imagine it's like michaelbuckbee said, that Panic's design
is a huge inspiration for others.

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rickette
This reminds me of the Ultimate Wallboard contest that Atlassian put out last
year <http://ultimatewallboard.com/entries>

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lutorm
Really big???

 _This_ is really big:

<http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/viz_systems.html>

~~~
dhbanes
too much bezel

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twog
Does anyone know what is powering the analytics? Is it gecko board? Or a
custom solution?

~~~
pmjoyce
Paul from Geckoboard here. Geckoboard doesn't collect or store the stats, it
collates and displays them.

These guys are hooking in to their analytics package. The web analytics
services we connect to include Google Analytics, Chartbeat, GoSquared &
Mixpanel natively, but you can use our push & pull APIs to connect custom
widgets.

