A Single Pane of Glass

I have always liked the term, “a single pane of glass.” On the mainframe, it referred to people who successfully consolidated all of their workstations and consoles into a single workstation (usually with a nice new look and feel, too). It's something you can show to a customer or someone in management, and they will visually understand what they're looking at.

That was our goal with Robot/NETWORK. We want your team to be able to manage all of your IBM i partitions and servers from a single workstation. The “single pane of glass” is the central place in the data center where your staff can quickly see when a server or process is having a problem.

Robot/NETWORK has a Map Center and a Status Center. Another term for the Map Center is topology map. What I like about a Map Center map is that you can put your own graphic image (jpg or bmp) in the background and position the servers on the map to their location. You could use a picture of the world, a country, a province, a state, or your data center.

So, the single pane of glass is the focal point. Alerts arrive from the Robot products as sounds, SMTP messages, SNMP messages, or pop-up messages to notify you when you need to check something. The console sounds an alarm that means, “Attention, a warning message has arrived.” You can even use your own recording (maybe you should record the CIO’s voice—that will wake the team up!).

Robot/NETWORK also can notify you with pop-up windows. Any time a status arrives, Robot/NETWORK pops the event up in a separate, fly-over bubble. The bubble describes the event—whether it’s about backups, messages, batch jobs, disk space, resources, applications, or whatever—and the Robot/NETWORK Status Center automatically refreshes with new information.

I believe this single pane is the one you can’t live without if you are managing multiple IBM i servers and partitions. Console consolidation is as old as the AS/400, yet many of us still manage server-by-server and partition-by-partition. Maybe it’s time to give Robot/NETWORK a try.