Consider a typical Watch Floor in a cloud computing data center, a Network Operations Center (NOC) or a Security Operations Center (SOC) as an example. There are usually hundreds of applications and servers and thousands of devices coming from a wide spectrum of vendors. Together there maybe thousands of application screens with information that warrants monitoring. Even if you only need to focus on monitoring a very small subset of the screens, such as 50 screens from 10 different applications, it is a real challenge to manually visit each application one-by-one, then navigate and click to open screens one-at-a-time to monitor their information. The situation is getting even worse if the subset of information that needs monitoring changes frequently.

The current approaches for monitoring are largely either hardware-based, which means the operational team needs to install dedicated hardware, including giant watch floor screen with hard-wired cables and computers; with a computer and a display for each specific screen they want to monitor, and stack them together to form a hardware-based dashboard for monitoring; or they have to invest into expensive custom or third-party software that can monitor and update information from limited fixed sources. Those approaches are not extensible, not flexible, and are expensive to implement. As cloud computing gains momentum, more and more data and applications will be in the "cloud". Figuring out how to view and monitor a huge number of information sources in a flexible way will become a bigger and bigger challenge.

SitScape brings a generic solution to address this real-world challenge.

With SitScape's Operational Monitoring Console solution, the ops team can easily “cherry pick” any part of any application screen they are interested in monitoring, create re-usable live visual objects on-demand. They can then re-mix those objects into dashboard console pages. The operations team can then view multiple objects on the same console page at-a-glance. The objects are live and update themselves automatically, showing the latest information from their sources.

Further more, to monitoring a large number of sources, multiple console pages can be bundled together, and the software can automatically run the display in a configurable slide-show mode, thus visualize and monitor a large number of live, disparate applications and infrastructure components in a single Web-based console.

For example, if an operator put six objects on one console page in a ten-console-pages bundle running in slide-show mode, he can monitor 60 sources automatically on a large LCD screen - all with just a Web browser. This can be easily replicated in another location with no expensive hardware and wiring.

his solution is not limited to just Data Centers or NOCs, it applies to many other businesses such as the Trading Floor of financial institution, Cyber Security Center, Customer Support Centers, Executive Briefing Centers, energy and power companies' switch centers, emergency control centers, military command centers and situation rooms, traffic control, conference information boards and welcome centers.

Self-Service and Ease-of-Use	The operations team can do it by themselves anytime in minutes with just a Web browser.
Requires no IT or infrastructure changes	Zero system integration work, zero programming, and no need to install extra hardware and software
Flexibility	Can monitor any application (both Web-based, and non-web-based) from any vendor and can be reconfigured by the end-users at any time on-demand in seconds
Cost Savings	No need to purchase a lot dedicate computers just to support displays; also reduce the number of displays since one display can monitor a lot more systems or applications. With the remote access capability, it can save software licensing cost as well.
Enhanced Visibility	Now that the team can easily monitor a lot more screens with reduced cost, they gain valuable insight into the systems under management, thus enhancing the quality of their services.
Mobility and Accessibility	Since it is 100% Web-Browser based, and supports smart mobile devices, the staff can monitor and access the information from any computer or mobile devices with a Web browser even if they are in another location or on the road. It is also much easier to set up new displays in another location without installing or duplicating computer hardware.