Stack Exchange's Really Big Monitor Setup | Hacker News Reader

Stack Exchange's Really Big Monitor Setup

blog.stackoverflow.com

81 pointsalexlmiller25 comments

I kinda expected more from a group hosting millions of conversations a year and undisclosed$$ derived from it. Think bigger, like Visa's NOC big...

http://images.fastcompany.com/upload/visa-headquarters.jpg

NOC-style dashboards seem hardly appropriate for the first thing you see when you walk into an office..

I used to design and build NOCS as a network management consultant, and we found one thing to be universally true at every NOC we designed:

1.) Even though the person who hired us fell in love with the set of NORAD from the movie Wargames with walls of giant monitors, not one of the NOC analysts sitting at their desks ever once looked up at the big screen (unless it was late at night and they replaced the network map with a first-person shooter) to do their job. They always look at the event viewer at their desk.

The big wall of screens is purely to impress customers/investors during visits.

Obviously. Its not built for function but coolness with the general intarwebZ and visiting customers and execs. I very much doubt that anyone at Stack is going to use that as well with the fonts as small as they are.

As a former military NOC watch officer I agree. We hardly ever used the video wall, it was mostly for higher-ups that came in and would glance at it. Everything else was on my desktop or was alerted to me by other people that had stuff on their desktops.

I currently work at a NOC. We've built a pretty nice setup to do our jobs (mostly software) but I've got no idea what others do. As for hardware, I don't know how I could use more then 3 or 4 screens or how the team could use a big one.

(Though we do want one but only because they're cool.)

I'd love to hear some war stories and see how you work with other teams.

edit: I typed this on my phone while waiting at the airport, so it's a little looser grammatically than I'd like.

I've been out of the network management space for about a decade, but ostensibly the big screen was pitched as a way to look at overall network health or identify a large-scale outage. There'd be a big-ass network topology map that would suddenly start showing red dots.

For the big topology map, that was usually done using Spectrum or Openview Network Node Manager (the only use we had for NNM for that matter, it sucked at everything else).

The reason I said "ostensibly" though, is because if you're relying on noticing red dots appear on the map to tell there's an outage, it means you aren't doing proper event correlation.

Most systems we built focused on the event viewer (Netcool for the most part, but it was just for deduplication as it didn't do actual correlation); so that's what would generally be on screen for an analyst. Their other screen would have their ticketing system (usually Remedy, but occasionally Vantive, which I vastly preferred).

The actual correlation engine was Nervecenter for the most part (which was a consultants dream as it took like 6 months to build all the rules), although we tried out a bunch of the "code book"-based correlation engines (SMARTS I believe was the name of one of the more egregious ones).

I worked on one project to build a NOC for Raytheon that 6 months into it they decided to make the whole thing automated (as in, not have any analysts actually working in the NOC) and that was interesting. We ended up having to write logic to handle all the notifications and queuing.

Like I said though, all of this was the Cretacious period for network management, so I really hope things have gotten better in the interim.

Very Wargames ... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

This sort of thing was popular during the dot-com boom.

While you're clearly implying that this is an indicator of a second tech bubble, you're using faulty logic to arrive at that conclusion. Computers were also popular during the dot-com boom. So was the Internet. That doesn't mean that a focus on internet computing caused the bubble, or even indicated it.

If you want to say that this is a managerial dashboard wankfest that may indicate a company more obsessed with metrics than with building a great product, just say it.

Why 3x580 instead of a single eyefinity Radeon? Would seem like a obvious choice for such project.

Since you don't need 3D acceleration, maybe a single Matrox card would be more appropriate. e.g. One of these http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/graphics_cards/m_... can drive 8 monitors.

Edit: whoops, didn't notice it was $$$$.

While they may not directly need the 3D acceleration it may be being used to their advantage still, that was one of my questions but they said that lower end cards were resulting in stuttering. It looked to me like it was all stuff in web browsers so they might be using newer chrome/ie and the like with hardware accelerated rendering.

I don't know - when a $290 Radeon can drive 6 monitors per card (with enough acceleration to draw basic 3D on each), is there really a place for Matrox any more? The card you linked is $1800.

I know either is a small fraction of the cost of the overall device, but you'd still want some kind of benefit for the price increase.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121...

Odd that half the screens have couch-style content and half have desktop-style content.

It looks like they took at least a little inspiration from Panic's Status Board: http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/

While we borrowed incredibly heavily from Panic's design at Fog Creek, I think StackExchange's is an example of parallel evolution more than anything else at this point. Panic built an absolutely beautiful board, but the idea of a board didn't originate with them, nor is there much overlap between StackExchange's and theirs.

Spolsky's interview technique here is flawless

I was thinking they were using Leftronic for their dashboard, but looks like they say it's Geckoboard. Interesting how there's a convergence around how dashboards look - I imagine it's like michaelbuckbee said, that Panic's design is a huge inspiration for others.

This reminds me of the Ultimate Wallboard contest that Atlassian put out last year http://ultimatewallboard.com/entries

Really big???

This is really big:

http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/viz_systems.html

too much bezel

Does anyone know what is powering the analytics? Is it gecko board? Or a custom solution?

He mentions Geckoboard

Paul from Geckoboard here. Geckoboard doesn't collect or store the stats, it collates and displays them.

These guys are hooking in to their analytics package. The web analytics services we connect to include Google Analytics, Chartbeat, GoSquared & Mixpanel natively, but you can use our push & pull APIs to connect custom widgets.

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