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Founder here: We're currently trying to evaluate if it makes sense for Arcentry to go beyond being a diagramming tool to becoming a cloud monitoring dashboard w

Founder here: We're currently trying to evaluate if it makes sense for Arcentry to go beyond being a diagramming tool to becoming a cloud monitoring dashboard with charts, scale groups etc. directly embedded into the visualisation. Would love to get your thoughts on it.

newaccoutnas 8y ago
I think there's definitely scope for a 'Weathermap' style monitoring overlay, however I'm not (personally) digging graphs overlaid isometrically with the infra. Perhaps a 2D overlay of charts? (Just my opinion, may not look that clean in reality)
puppetmaster 8y ago
My two cents, do one thing well. Monitoring is as hard to tackle as good, and meaningful dashboarding. I would focus on working on integrating with third party monitoring keeping the core in the dashboards. Coming from and industrial control & instrumentation background I like dashboards that show all elements in a system and how they interact with each other (Look for SCADA dashboards of a turbine, for example) looks great btw, kudos and good luck!
- wolframhempel 8y ago
  Thanks! We actually build a SCADA demo using it - preview here https://youtu.be/ol4SkqeAVfA https://youtu.be/ol4SkqeAVfA
  - puppetmaster 8y ago
    Woah!! That looks great! I think you should share this prominently on your website, showing how you can do more than just cloud. There are a lot of infrastructure segments that could benefit from your product even beyond the industrial setting. Traffic? Production lines? More!
  - dsl 8y ago
    You need to add a lot more generic icons that are not tied to specific cloud providers. I found it very difficult to map out a system I built in a datacenter.
    - wolframhempel 8y ago
      Sure - what extactly would you be looking for? There's also a section in Arcentry labelled "Generic & Customizable Components" which has 56 generic servers, databases, PCs and basics like cubes and triangles.
clusmore 8y ago
I think you need to charge a lot more than $10/mo for unlimited usage, especially for a monitoring tool. Edit: Just saw you have an enterprise tier at $12/user/mo.
sbr464 8y ago
I say go for it, or maybe just add a generic event hook/workflow system that has basic Boolean logic? See json-logic etc. I like the updating metrics, the mixer animation in the scada demo was especially cute.
izyda 8y ago
This is very cool. I would love to use this in a data science / data engineering context. At my firm, we build complex data pipelines (data goes from S3 -> Spark -> Redshift -> between Redshift tables etc.). Our data sources comes from FTPs, vendor databases, vendor flatfiles, etc. Further, business analysts build Tableau dashboards on materialized views or temp tables. Data scientists use raw data tables and create aggregated tables or forecasts. It would be tremendously helpful to have a way to map out programmatically where the data is going and coming from (which vendor FTP did this table come from, where is this view coming from, etc.) We have utility functions/libraries (use Scala & R) that we always use for reading data, writing tables, etc. It would be amazing to just plug in API calls into those utility functions to auto-generate maps which we could later edit/document. The new trends of data catalogues (see https://alation.com/ https://alation.com/ or http://data.world)is http://data.world)is really useful - but it requires a lot of manual documentation (non-programmatic) that data scientists inevitably don't do.

newaccoutnas 8y ago

I think there's definitely scope for a 'Weathermap' style monitoring overlay, however I'm not (personally) digging graphs overlaid isometrically with the infra. Perhaps a 2D overlay of charts? (Just my opinion, may not look that clean in reality)

puppetmaster 8y ago

My two cents, do one thing well. Monitoring is as hard to tackle as good, and meaningful dashboarding. I would focus on working on integrating with third party monitoring keeping the core in the dashboards. Coming from and industrial control & instrumentation background I like dashboards that show all elements in a system and how they interact with each other (Look for SCADA dashboards of a turbine, for example) looks great btw, kudos and good luck!

wolframhempel 8y ago
Thanks! We actually build a SCADA demo using it - preview here https://youtu.be/ol4SkqeAVfA https://youtu.be/ol4SkqeAVfA
- puppetmaster 8y ago
  Woah!! That looks great! I think you should share this prominently on your website, showing how you can do more than just cloud. There are a lot of infrastructure segments that could benefit from your product even beyond the industrial setting. Traffic? Production lines? More!
- dsl 8y ago
  You need to add a lot more generic icons that are not tied to specific cloud providers. I found it very difficult to map out a system I built in a datacenter.
  - wolframhempel 8y ago
    Sure - what extactly would you be looking for? There's also a section in Arcentry labelled "Generic & Customizable Components" which has 56 generic servers, databases, PCs and basics like cubes and triangles.

clusmore 8y ago

I think you need to charge a lot more than $10/mo for unlimited usage, especially for a monitoring tool. Edit: Just saw you have an enterprise tier at $12/user/mo.

sbr464 8y ago

I say go for it, or maybe just add a generic event hook/workflow system that has basic Boolean logic? See json-logic etc. I like the updating metrics, the mixer animation in the scada demo was especially cute.

izyda 8y ago

This is very cool. I would love to use this in a data science / data engineering context. At my firm, we build complex data pipelines (data goes from S3 -> Spark -> Redshift -> between Redshift tables etc.). Our data sources comes from FTPs, vendor databases, vendor flatfiles, etc. Further, business analysts build Tableau dashboards on materialized views or temp tables. Data scientists use raw data tables and create aggregated tables or forecasts. It would be tremendously helpful to have a way to map out programmatically where the data is going and coming from (which vendor FTP did this table come from, where is this view coming from, etc.) We have utility functions/libraries (use Scala & R) that we always use for reading data, writing tables, etc. It would be amazing to just plug in API calls into those utility functions to auto-generate maps which we could later edit/document. The new trends of data catalogues (see https://alation.com/ https://alation.com/ or http://data.world)is http://data.world)is really useful - but it requires a lot of manual documentation (non-programmatic) that data scientists inevitably don't do.