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A dashboard is a graphical user interface (GUI) that somewhat resembles an automobile's dashboard—it organizes and presents information in a way that makes it easy to understand the status of the working environment. In the case of an automobile, the dashboard reveals the state of the engine, the brakes, the speed of the car, fuel levels, and more.

In the case of a business, NMS executive and business dashboards highlight the state of IT (the network and critical servers, databases and applications, etc.), the business (branch offices, business productivity levels, etc.) as well as the state of its end users (business service transaction speeds, quality of service, etc.).

As the dashboard example below illustrates, this combined set of technology and business status indicators makes it possible to fully understand the state of critical business services and the end-to-end IT infrastructure.

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With the broad array of Nimsoft Probes, Gateways, and Adapters, it is possible to access practically any type of IT and business data. Once the data has been collected and consolidated into Nimsoft, it becomes available for display in Nimsoft Executive and Business Dashboards.

The Nimsoft Dashboard example below illustrates how data from multiple data sources can be consolidated and displayed into a single view.

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Nimsoft is able to collect and monitor IT and business data to determine its realtime alert status, it can also archive data to expose long and short-term performance trends, furthermore it can analyze IT and business data against service level objectives to determine SLA compliance.

Each type of status indicator; alert, performance trends, and SLA compliance, can be combined into a single Nimsoft Executive and Business Dashboard view. Other market offerings do not provide this combined set of health status visibility.

With a combined set of status indicators, it becomes possible to see - in a single view - realtime alerts, trends leading up to alerts, and the impact alerts and performance trends are having on service level commitments.

The Nimsoft Executive and Business Dashboard example below provides a real working example of this combined set of status indicators.

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Nimsoft Executive and Business Dashboards do not force users to operate from a single, fixed look and feel interface. Nimsoft provides the flexibility for users to build dashboards that suit personal preferences and achieve the desired management perspectives.

This flexibility is made possible with the Nimsoft Dashboard Design Toolkit - using the toolkit is much like using Microsoft PowerPoint - the toolkit contains an assortment of alert objects, meters and graph objects, text objects (active and inactive), picture objects, and much, much more.

Nimsoft users drag and drop widgets and objects from the toolkit (depicted on the left in the product screen example below) into the working dashboard view to the right. Once there, users will link the objects to the rich set of alert, performance, and service level data collected and contained within Nimsoft.

Dashboard objects can be moved and sized, custom colors can be applied, company logos can be added, graphic images of any format can be included (i.e. jpg, visio, gif, bmp, etc.), and more. The full set of features in the Nimsoft Dashboard Design Toolkit is intended to help users build views that fit their management requirements.

Visit the Nimsoft Dashboard Gallery to see the power of the Nimsoft Dashboard Design Toolkit.

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Nimsoft Executive and Business Dashboards provide multi-layer design and navigation capabilities. This means objects that are designed into a Nimsoft dashboard can be made to access a second level dashboard when selected. This action can be repeated for any number of dashboard layers, thus creating a multi-layer dashboard configuration.

A common use of a multi-layer dashboard is to view a managed environment in a hierarchical fashion, i.e. from a business perspective with drill down to technology components, or from a Service Provider perspective with drill down to individual customer views.

The graphic illustration below demonstrates a multi-layer dashboard scenario.

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Dashboard Layer 1: In the example above, the highest-level dashboard contains business service objects and has accompanying alarm indicators (which will illuminate as underlying objects propagate their status upwards) as well as SLA compliance indicators.

Dashboard Layer 2: Continuing from the example above, selecting a business service object in the top level dashboard will produce a second level dashboard that displays its end-to-end service components, i.e. servers, network devices, and also includes end-user quality of service indicators.

Dashboard Layer 3: In this example there are multiple third layer dashboards - selecting the leftmost end-user experience object will produce a dashboard that details application transaction response times. The detail provided in this dashboard will help in understanding the end-user's experience as users exercise business applications.

The object selected furthest to the right is a database server - selecting the server object will produce a database specific dashboard with a complete set of realtime and historical health status indicators.

The object selected nearest the bottom is an application server - selecting this object produces a server specific dashboard and shows a comprehensive set of server status indicators - both realtime and historical.

Dashboard Layer 4: When the dashboard layers have reached their end, an alert list will appear. The alerts spell out the nature of the condition in friendly text and thus prompt a rapid response and resolution to the condition at hand.

Building single- or multi-layer dashboards is a simple process when utilizing the Nimsoft Dashboard Designer Toolkit.

Once Nimsoft Executive and Business Dashboards have been created and saved, they can then be assigned access rights. With Nimsoft, it is possible to create a broad array of different look and feel Dashboards - each providing a desired management view.

With the Nimsoft ACL (Access Control List) feature, users can be setup to access and interact with only the dashboards that are assigned to them.

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