CIO Dashboard

Recently I read the following InformationWeek article: Hunting the Elusive CIO Dashboard. As I read my heart began to race and I felt some panic. I didn't have a dashboard. Were other technology management professionals leaving me behind? Was there something I was missing? Did I even have any Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)? What was wrong with my leadership that I didn't have a nifty tool to peer into the inner workings of my organization? Then there was this statement "...when the CIO can't get a clear picture of the real-time data that underlies critical applications, infrastructure, and projects, IT too often ends up reacting to issues after users and customers are having problems." Man, that sounded too familiar.

Thus began my hunt for that elusive dashboard. I started with the question: "What are my KPIs?" I compiled a list of the things that keep me up at night namely: financials, resource allocation and workload, and network and systems performance.

My next question was "If these are the most important items to me, how do I track them today?" The truth is, I do track them. While I might not have a really cool dashboard, I do use multiple tools to get the information I need. I pull financial information out of our financial applications, I track resource usage and workload through our request system, and i track network and systems performance through our monitoring systems.

I began to think about how I could consolidate the data into a high level dashboard, and how I might want to organize one. This led me to do some research...by research I'm referring to googling variations of "CIO dashboard." I found several products that I won't list here, including some BI tools that are already in use in my organization. One thing that the majority of these tools require is for the data that feeds the dashboard to be in a database. Not a problem, 99% of the information I look at is pulled from a table.

The more I researched, the more I wanted to find a simple (and hopefully cheap) tool that would provide a front-end with the capability of linking to other applications for drilling into the details. Why reinvent the wheel? I eventually settled on an open source product called MarvelIT. MarvelIT is an Apache Jetspeed portal based product. It provides several cool little portlets that you use for building charts, reports, rss feeds, etc. It's MySQL based and also includes the drivers for Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. As long as you, or someone on your staff, can create the queries and format some XML, MarvelIT will work for you. I really like that it's browser based a platform independent...translation it runs on Macs, Windows, and Linux machines.

As I mentioned earlier, 99% of the information I need can be pulled from an existing table. For the rest, mostly in the form of capital expenditures and internally developed software costs, I added some tables to the MarvelIT database (I could've created a separate database but I used MarvelIT's for convenience). MarvelIT provides some data entry portlet tools. I tied those into the tables I created so that I can update them from the site.

I organized my dashboard into two sections. The left side contains resource, systems, and network utilization. The right side contains my financial indicators. I set up URLs behind the charts and reports to the applications I'm pulling information from...well, at least those applications that have a web interface. I must admit it's really nice being able to track my KPI's in one place.

It took me less than a week to set up my CIO dashboard. If you're in IT management and you're looking for a dashboard tool without spending lots of money, I recommend MarvelIT. Click here to see a sample of my dashboard...before you ask it's using test data I loaded on my Macbook Pro.

Ubuntu/Tomcat 5.5 Issues

I've been running Ubuntu Linux, specifically Feisty Fawn, and Tomcat 5.5 on a server at my house for a few months now. So far I've encountered only one issue: Tomcat5.5 doesn't start properly. In order to start it (once the startup.sh script has run), I've had to go to the /var/log/tomcat5.5 directory and sudo cat the catalina.out file. Doing so jump starts the tomcat console and messages start displaying. Once the INFO: Server startup message appears, I ctrl-C out of the catalina.out file. While this workaround solves the issue, it causes me some extra steps every time I reboot the server or restart tomcat...not that I have to do that very often. But, it's a pain. Tonight I finally had enough and starting searching the web for a solution. I found an explanation and a solution here on Cefn Hoile's blog. Thanks Cefn! I've listed the solution below for those of you who find my blog first: the first time you startup tomcat you:

1. cd /var/log/tomcat5.5
2. sudo mv catalina.out catalina.out.old
3. sudo touch catalina.out
4. sudo chown tomcat55:nogroup catalina.out

dotproject: open source project management for the rest of us

If you're in IT, chances are sooner or later you're going to be managing a project. And, if you're managing a project of any size, you need a set of tools to help. For those of you who use a PC running Windows whatever...you know who you are...Microsoft Project will probably be your tool of choice. And, if you're into the whole project management certification track, Microsoft Project makes a lot of sense because so many of the training materials reference it.

But, if you're a Mac user like me, Microsoft Project is not an option (unless of course you're dual booting on an Intel or running Parallels and/or Virtual PC). And, if you're less concerned about project management certification and more concerned about managing projects, you still need a tool. What are your choices?

I've done some less than extensive research and the tool I've started using is dotProject. It's an open source project management tool written in PHP and MySQL. The only other thing you need is a web server. I've run it on both a Mac and on an ubuntu linux box.

While not as feature rich as Project, it has the most commonly used features. One that I like is the ticketing system. An issue that I often deal with during the life of a project is determining when a task is complete. This really becomes difficult with software development. Often a particular object or program that has been finished at one point in a project, has to be modified later in the project as requirements change. What to do? Do you reopen the task, create a new task that reflects the modifications, or do you add the time it's going to take to make the changes to another task? One solution is to use dotProject's ticket system to create a ticket for the mods that can linked to the project. I really like this concept for small changes during the life of a project.

Anyway, if you're looking for a non-Microsoft solution to your project management needs, check out dotProject.

Dice Project Management Article

I recently read this project management article, Ten Skills for Project Management Success, on Dice.com (no I wasn't posting a resume) that might be of interest to some of you. I really like tip 6: Stay Away from Microsoft Project. I agree with the writer, if you want to quickly lose peoples' attention show them a complex gantt chart and some resource docs. While these tools are good for the project team, they do not translate well to management. When presenting project progress to your management team, try keeping it simple and concentrate on the big picture. It's been my experience that if management wants the details, they'll ask for them.

JavaFX Tricks: LookAndFeel

Yes I know, it's been awhile since I've blogged. Over the last few months I've been working on some swing apps, installing ubuntu on a server at my house, and testing open source network monitoring software.

During my time away, I've also been working with JavaFX...I'll blog more on this later. For now I want to leave you with a FX tip that I couldn't find on-line. To change the look and feel of your FX script from the system default to one of the other Java look and feels do the following:

import javafx.ui.*;

Frame {
      lookAndFeel: "javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalLookAndFeel"
      title: "Metal Look and Feel"
      height: 400
      width: 600
      content: Label {
                text: "Metal Look And Feel"
              }
      visible: true
};

As you can see from the example, the lookAndFeel attribute string needs to be set to the java look and feel class that you want to use.