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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

My initial reaction is not running space missions, but that it will be a replacement for graphite/grafana - our company's telemetry is the web requests hitting the main site or database queries on the new server or trial sign-ups achieved, email reminders sent etc?

In short - Watching day to day operations and looking for anything unusual.

I think this kind of platform is wide open country - every corp has something like this, large chunks home grown or massively customised. And they all suck to varying degrees.

My prediction - replacing that mess with a "mission control system from freaking NASA" is going to make big in-roads.

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Also, if NASA is working with USDS, then the playbook is Play 13: "Default to Open". Not sure if they are but could be likely!

> When appropriate, publish source code of projects or components online

source: https://playbook.cio.gov/#play13

I think this is big in NASA culture - I mean they built half of openstack IIRC.

So I am not surprised it's getting released - I am surprised that, after a minutes thought, this is a big, open field.

I mean prometheus/ graphite grafana - hell even RRD (?) have been around for years. But that's all plumbing, the porcelain is what's missing - to have a singular platform that it just gives you a real time view of what's going on, it that embeds probably decades of hard won experience - yeah if this is even half decent it's going to be the beating heart dashboard of choice.

Want to impress the C-level execs - give them a read only access the the "company telemetry" - mission control from NASA.

Aw hell. There ought to be a good consultancy in just installing this stuff.

Honestly having dashboards is just a good idea in general, impressing execs aside.

Graphs are a really really good way of getting an accurate gut feeling about what's going on. Take GME for example, what happened? Before you start talking about a short squeeze just get a graph of the share price out.

If I dump a CSV file in your inbox pre-coffee or whatever, you might blank, but if we have a graph of "Profit per widget" on the wall (metaphorical or literal) it's obvious if something's just broken.

Unfortunately, NASA has to follow ITAR, which means that a lot of stuff has to be kept closed - for example, basically anything on the topic of computational fluid dynamics (e.g. [0]). US persons can request a copy of much of this software, but they have to sign an agreement with NASA promising not to redistribute it without NASA's permission.

Are China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, al Qaeda, ISIS, really disadvantaged by not being able to access NASA's CFD software? I'm sure the nation-states have the money and people to work it out for themselves, whereas the non-state actors wouldn't know what to do with it.

[0] https://software.nasa.gov/software/ARC-14400-1

> I'm sure the nation-states have the money and people to work it out for themselves

I'd suspect it's less a matter of preventing them from developing the capability and more a matter of making them spend their own money to do so, rather than getting it for free and using those resources to develop some other capability.

Is there a reason North Korea would be reluctant to sail the seven seas for a copy of Ansys?

Russia and China may quite possibly have copies of some of NASA's export-controlled software anyway - through computer intrusion, or through old-fashioned means of espionage (threaten/induce someone with access to a copy to give it to them.) If there was some particular item they wanted, they probably could come up with it through those methods, given enough time and effort.

Do you feel this is a common thing for a medium sized company to use? Would you pay much money for something like that?

Years ago now, I developed a platform that allowed users to add "blocks" of data points pulled from any API to a dashboard to achieve the same goal. I never went the whole distance because I didn't get any users, but the dream was themed dashboards of graphs, tickers, event triggers and so on.

Datadog IPO’d on this idea. We used them at a 30-ish person company and hot damn it was amazing. 7/7 would use again.

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