Application Insight Made Visible
Chronographs, an optional add-on to the ClearStone platform, provides rich, flexible visualizations that compare performance across time series or metrics. Along with dozens of standard templates, Chronograph Builder supports ad-hoc visualizations which can be designed by end users – without any SQL experience – in minutes. Chronographs are seamlessly integrated with the ClearStone Real-Time Console for side-by side comparisons of current to historical data or baselines.
The Evident ClearStone Chronographs viewer.
For distributed caching, data can be analyzed based on cluster, cache, and node statistics. Custom application metrics (such as the number of shopping carts, sessions, searches, etc.), middleware metrics (such as the number of messages, queue depth, etc.) or any other JMX beans can be aggregated, correlated, and transformed mathematically. Data is stored in a data warehouse, and can be trended from hours to months with a granularity of 5-minute to daily intervals, and user-selectable data retention policies.
A New Approach for Providing Ad-hoc Historical Visualizations
The Evident ClearStone Chronographs option is a historical visualization framework and not a standard reporting tool. If offers these capabilities and benefits:
- Build Your Own Reports
The Chronograph Builder is an end-user tool, not a developer tool, so it does not require report writing or database expertise. Configuration is GUI-based, so there is no need to learn a report scripting language or SQL to generate visualizations.
- Real Time Analysis and Historical Context Side-by-Side
Integrated real-time and historical visualizations using a single GUI (the ClearStone Real-Time Console).
- Browser Access, Client-Free – No client software is required
The Chronographs GUI is based on Adobe Flex, which runs on any web browser with an Adobe Flash Player plug-in.
- Ad-hoc Visualizations
ChronoGraph visualizations are flexible and self-sufficient. Users can start with the pre-built templates and then quickly generate custom visualizations using the intuitive Builder tool. - No Professional Services Required
Chronographs make it easy to define the analytical views you want to see. You don’t need to contract professionals services simply to get custom views on your cluster’s historical performance.
Evident ClearStone Chronograph Builder
The Evident ClearStone Chronograph Builder is a design tool for for creating new historical visualizations (Chronographs). Using the Builder, a designer can create templates that display trend charts for specific metrics that are stored in the data warehouse. Each Chronograph template is customizable (chart type and formatting, such as axis, titles, legend, etc). The Chronograph Builder offers designs a broad range of metrics with different levels of granularity. Common aggregation methods are available to consolidate/summarize data across multiple data sets or time series. Designers can specify both default and runtime parameters.
Evident ClearStone's ChronoGraph Builder makes it easy to customize historical analysis.
Once the designer has created a template, he or she can save it, publishing it for future use. The stored template can then be accessed, loaded, and initialized by any user.
Evident ClearStone ChronoGraph Viewer
IT engineers and business users access published Chronographs through the Evident ClearStone Chronograph Viewer. The Chronograph Viewer is deployed as a plug-in (a tab) on the Real-Time Console. The Viewer allows end users to access and view multiple Chronographs in a single view. The Viewer’s user interface consists of a Template Catalog for selecting an available Chronograph, a Parameter Panel for entering any initialization parameters required for the specific visualization, and a Viewer Panel that contains the actual cluster performance charts and graphs specified by the template using the historical data contained within the Data Warehouse.
Here are a couple of examples of Chronographs presented by the Chronograph Viewer:
Evident ClearStone Chronographs cache charts.
Evident ClearStone Chronographs node charts.
