Ask Slashdot: Best Management Interface On an IT Appliance?

tippen writes "The management user interface on most networking and storage appliances are, shall we say, not up to the snuff compared to modern websites or consumer products. What are the best examples of good UX design on an IT appliance that you've managed? What was it that made you love it? What should companies (or designers) developing new products look to as best-in-class that they should be striving for?"

Comments

Not enough Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Not enough Javascript. Not enough external dependencies. Yeah, this totally needs to be more like modern websites.

Re:Not enough Flash

[mwvdlee]

The two don't need to exclude each other.

Create a user interface that can do everything without javascript and without any flashy graphics, then add some CSS stylesheet to make it look nicer and flashier and add javascript to add more convenient ways of doing what you could already do without.

For example, take a classic list ordering GUI with up/down buttons. Works fine without javascript. Add javascript to make it also do drag&drop. It works better with javascript, but still works just fine without.

Web interfaces can gracefully degrade down to a very low level.

Re:Not enough Flash

[Chris Newton]

For example, take a classic list ordering GUI with up/down buttons. Works fine without javascript. Add javascript to make it also do drag&drop. It works better with javascript, but still works just fine without.

Web interfaces can gracefully degrade down to a very low level.

Yes they can, but not for free.

This sort of idea makes us geeks feel warm and fuzzy inside, but the reality is that you're talking about implementing two completely different versions of that UI feature. Doing so takes time and money, and you’d be spending that time and money purely to support a use case that probably represents a negligible number of users (people who want to run these UIs but have JS disabled).

Of course portability and compatibility are important for user interfaces, but this is a cost/benefit question. There is a line beyond which the results do not justify the effort, and any resources you’re spending past that line aren’t being spent on implementing other features or improving the usability elsewhere in your UI.

junos cli

[BestNicksRTaken]

better than ios, easily parsed by scripts, regex support etc.

Focus upon usability, not looks ...

[MacTO]

For usability, you need to look at your target market. This means that you should be asking the people who will buy your product, rather than the people on Slashdot. (If we are your target market, at least let us know what you are developing so that we can provide meaningful input.)

Re:And the answer is...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would agree. The best appliances have good CLIs and REST interfaces. Otherwise they are just a mess of crap. Have you ever seen a SAN interface? Or Vmware? Or Microsoft System Center? (if anyone can figure out what the hell is going on in that interface I would love to know.)

The best of the crappy interfaces is probably something like Qnap, they have great IOS interfaces, and the regular web interface is decent.

Take a look at Synology's DSM

[Anonymous Coward]

The best full featured modern UI on an appliance I have ever seen. I like it because it is easy to use. http://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/index/overview

Re:Take a look at Synology's DSM

[PsyMan]

I would have to agree with you, Synology for their NAS range is very intuitive for non techy people, shame the hardware underneath is a bit underpowered for what it could be. For SOHO though you could pretty much run one as the main server. Great GUI for a linux backend. XPEnology is pretty good too though, best of both worlds when installed on to a mid end PC (thinking i5 / low end Xeon ?) not entirely legal though I suspect. I guess the usibility is why their NAS's hold their price second hand as it can't be the power of the hardware or reletively slow network transfer rates that keep them popular. Hmm, where have we seen that before ? Apple ?

Re:Take a look at Synology's DSM

[otis wildflower]

Synology is busybox-based, with md/lvm tools etc., and for the most part behaves properly. The GUI is handy for remote access and management (with self-signed cert), and is pretty functional for all but the corneriest of corner cases.

This past week I needed to ssh in in order to e2fsck my storage prior to lvextending it. Kinda disappointed I had to do that, but the fact is that I could and did. Also, since the RAID is in software, in theory I could pull my 7 drive RAID out and stick it in another linux box and vg(im|ex)port it.

My 1812+ has adequate power for pushing ~100+MB/s with its dual-core Atom and 3GB (it took a spare laptop SO-DIMM), and runs at a pretty low wattage rate vs. a handbuild mid tower. It can't transcode, but I have WDTV Live boxes that support most codecs fairly well for that.

General goodness

[bertok]

Specific examples are hard to come by, but I've noticed the general trend that differentiates the "good" from the "barely usable"..

* Scalability. For example, a good interface will pop up a "search" box for finding a security group in Active Directory. A bad one will let me chose security groups from a list or a drop-down. Both look equally good when the developer is working in a test environment. The latter will crash when used in a million-object directory. Similarly, check out the DNS management dialog box in Windows, or some Oracle tools. Both will show you "all" objects up to some limit (e.g.: 5000), but then provide a filter option to allow you to narrow down the "search" to prevent the GUI from melting if you look at a database with 500K tables. Yes. It happens. A lot. More than you think. Really.
* Annotations. It's 2014 for Christ's sake! There is absolutely no reason not to include a general "note" or at least a "description" field with every. Single. Thing. Seriously. All of them. I'm not kidding. Look at VMware's vSphere interface as an example of this done reasonably well but not perfectly. They at least allow custom columns so you can tag things systematically. Better yet, newer versions of Microsoft's Group Policy allow annotations on every single setting.
* Versioning. For example, Citrix NetScaler keeps the last 'n' versions of its configuration automatically (5 by default I think). Why the fuck Cisco can't do the same with their 1KB but omfg-they're-ultra-critical-to-the-whole-goddamned-enterprise config files I just don't understand. Maybe they're trying to save precious bytes...
* Policy. Good examples are Cisco UCS Blades and, of course, Active Directory Group Policy. Settings should trickle down through hierarchies. I should never have to set the exact same setting five hundred times. Settings should set-and-unset themselves automatically based on the scenario, e.g.: replacing a blade should not involve having to reconfigure its BIOS settings by hand. A typical bad example is 99% of Linux, where every setting has to be either manually set or set via a script. A script is still manual, just faster. No! Smack yourself in the face! A script is NOT a replacement for a policy engine. Don't breathe in, ready to go on a rant about how great Linux is, and how easy it is to manage, because it's really not. Scripts are a "write only" management tool that result in impossible-to-reverse-engineer solutions that can only be replaced wholesale years down the track.
* Help. I'm not really a storage engineer, I just... dabble. However, I've set up labs with IBM and EMC kit, no problem. The one time I got asked to create a simple logical volume on a Hitachi array, I walked away backwards and refused to touch the stupid thing. It seriously had 10 pages of settings along the lines of "L3 Mode: 5/7?" I mean... wat? So sure, I press F1 for help like a naive fool. It helpfully informed me that the setting configures L3 Mode to either mode 5 or mode 7. I can press "OK" to accept the mode setting, or "Cancel" otherwise. I was enlightened. Meanwhile, the same dialog box on the EMC array basically asks for where, what size, and what RAID level.
* Behind the Scenes. Some GUIs have 1:1 mappings with some sort of underlying command-line or protocol. Consoles based on PowerShell such as most Microsoft and Citrix products come to mind, most Linux/Unix GUIs, and Database admin tools. The better ones will have a "tab" or a pop-up somewhere which shows the "script equivalent" of whatever you're doing in the GUI. This is very useful, particularly for beginners, and we're all beginners with every product at least once.

Really, GUI design is -- or should be -- a science, and not a trivial one! It integrates serious engineering constraints, business restrictions, project management priorities along with the fuzzy complexities of both individual psychology and the complex dynamics of interacting groups of people. It's done woefully wrong even by the largest c

Re:General goodness

[Chris Newton]

Thank you for the insightful post. I create user interfaces professionally, I share many of your frustrations with the generally poor standards in the industry, and I find it reassuring that at least some people who use the kind of tools I build do actually value good usability!

The one big thing I would add to your points is that whatever kind of user interface you’re building — CLI, GUI, API, whatever — it’s always going to be limited by how well thought-out the underlying configuration model is. If you have a system that requires 745 interacting settings to be correct before it works, and the guy who changes those settings is doing it at 4am after his pager woke him up, you’re unlikely to see a happy ending no matter how polished the presentation of those 745 settings might be in any UI. It never ceases to amaze me how many UIs don’t get their fundamentals down first, and just think it’ll be OK as long as the UI is pretty, compatible with Brand X, compatible with Scripting Tool Y, compatible with Management Protocol Z, or some other useful but second-tier benefit.

Please do share any other rants, general frustrations, examples of things that were really useful, or other similar comments you have. These kinds of threads are gold for those of us who work in the industry.

Re:General goodness

[Chris Newton]

Code monkeys never ask Rack monkeys what issues they face on the real field.

That’s not entirely fair. As a guy making UIs, I love hearing from the front-line what the users actually want, what they like and what they would like to see improved.

However, most development roles aren’t naturally customer-facing, and the focus for most people between the customers and the developers is usually on features (and commercial matters like pricing, of course), so this is the information that will naturally flow through an organisation and drive development.

Likewise, from the user’s side, often the people who are in contact with suppliers and making buying decisions aren’t the people who are personally going to get that 4am wake-up call to actually use these products. If there are things that matter and they aren’t obvious in the way that a tick in a feature column or a discount on a price are obvious, someone has to tell the guys doing the buying/negotiations so they can pass it on.

Basically, picking up more general usability issues like the ones bertok mentioned above either takes an exceptionally enlightened and well-structured organisation where this kind of information routinely gets passed on as well, or it takes guys at both ends of the chain who form side channels to get the little details through, and this goes on both the supplier and the customer side.

Re:General goodness

[bertok]

I love hearing from the front-line what the users actually want, what they like and what they would like to see improved.

This.

It's surprising how little feedback there is in the real world.

One of the best experiences of my career (when I had a developer hat on), was sitting in the room where Level 1 and 2 support staff were on the phone, supporting a system that I had built and was doing Level 3 support on. Until then, it would not have occurred to me that a good 20% of their time was wasted on looking up contact details. No problem, I integrated a one-click contact-lookup function into the dashboard system. They loved it. I never would have thought that "fast search" (think milliseconds) was a "feature" until I saw how important it was for a helpdesk person to not have to wait for anything while talking to someone interactively.

Things of that nature resulted in a UI that -- while a bit quirky from a developer's perspective -- allowed them to get their jobs done efficiently! It was all really simple stuff to implement, but I wouldn't have ever gone down that path if I didn't have that direct feedback and on-site observation of user behavior.

Re:And the answer is...

[mysidia]

I would agree. The best appliances have good CLIs and REST interfaces. Otherwise they are just a mess of crap. Have you ever seen a SAN interface? Or Vmware?

Yes.... NetApp DataOnTap's SSH shell + OnCommand and VMware ESXi SSH console and .NET vCenter client are some examples of Companies designing management interfaces properly.

If you think THOSE or bad............. then I got a ton of devices with crappy CLIs and GUIs to show you.

*Now VMware is moving in the crappiness direction with their whole deprecation of the .Net client, and shiny new crappy Web1.5 Flash-enabled webUI developed using Adobe flex, but newer vSphere not in production, so don't count the horrible unusable web "UI" against them just yet.

Re:None

[msauve]

s/telnet/ssh/

I prefer my critical infrastructure management to be somewhat secure.

Synology NAS is excellent

[horza]

If you don't mind home appliances, then the Synology one is the best I have experienced. Easy to use, stable, one click installs for everything, intuitive. It does the desktop metaphor but unlike all the JS libraries I've come across this one doesn't appear to lag. Well suited to its application.

In terms of server management, er probably none of them. Including the web based ones like cPanel, webmin and Plesk. OpenPanel has pretty screen shots, though you don't want to read phrases like "Please note that OpenApp always expects a clean install! Installing OpenApp packages on a non-clean system is likely to lead to data-loss or a non-functional system" so I wouldn't actually install it. All the ISPs present bottom-up approach to management, making it piecemeal. I'd rather have a top-down approach.

Phillip.

LuCi from Openwrt

[JonathanP.Bennett]

I really do like the LuCi interface on the openwrt project. Though it's even more fun to turn it off, leaving only ssh access, and get calls from the clueless IT guy that is trying to twiddle something he shouldn't be.

Negative Example

[the eric conspiracy]

NOT Sonicwall!!! Gawd it SUX.

The less your UI has in common with that clusterfuck the better.

I have a number of them.

[attemptedgoalie]

NetApp

- Command Line in cDOT is pretty useful, I script a ton of things due to this.
- OnCommand System Manager has problems, it even lost functionality in the move from the non clustered OnTap to clustered OnTap. (easy to fix on their end, just a lack of attention to detail) But when you have 30+ filers across a dozen sites, it's all well organized. I'd like to see better performance, but it does 90% of what I need.
- The old FilerView worked for a small shop, but having all filers in the same interface is mandatory when you have as many as we do.

Isilon
- The web interface is pretty in OneFS7, but working with fileshares is kind of icky. When you have something that scales to 20-40PB, you'll have a few fileshares. And every time I have to work with one, it's not a great experience.

Violin
- My old 3000 series had an excellent interface, but it's limited since it's straight SAN, no CIFS/NFS. But fully HTML5, fully rearrangeable.
- The 6000 series interface is supposed to be a tremendous upgrade. I have one in a box waiting for me to get to our DR site to light it up, so hopefully soon I'll know more. But this has been my favorite interface so far.

Nimble
- I don't use this one weekly, a different admin works on it, but it seems pretty straight forward.

DataDomain
- Same as above. It works. Nothing to write home about.

FusionIO
- Big whoop. We're actually going to put Pernix in front of our FusionIO cards and stop using their interface as Pernix has so much better functionality and integration with vCenter.

PureStorage
- I don't own this, we are about to do a POC. But it seems pretty nice from the sales pitch/demos.

If you want to see a decent layout, NetApp's onCommand System Manager does a good job.

If you want to see excellent non-Adobe flash functionality, Violin.

Hope that's useful.

a few suggestions

[RobertLTux]

1 have a Quick Setup page with the most common settings all in one shot
2 Don't have "mystery magic" type settings (hint have a WIFI ON button not spread the ON function across 3 different settings that seem unrelated)
3 have a CLI "rail" so that CLI monkeys can bash the keys when they want to (but have something in the manual where it says
" to enable the SpeedConfig (TM) rail input %^73gH and the products serial number as your first command [this will be a permanent setting]")
4 put how to get to the admin console on a sticker on the item
5 do not assume that the person is using a laptop with 1024X768 res (hint there are things called netbooks running about and you also have smartphones)

Re:And the answer is...

[mysidia]

It's been a while since I used NetApp though. NetApp and 3PAR's management toolkits crap all over HP MSA/EVA or the various IBM SAN consoles for usability.

Yeah... welll.... I believe even Cisco's CLI, Dell Equallogic's management console, and even Nexenta craps on what HP provides with MSA/EVA.

I also hate the UIs of small business storage vendors, and I am thinking of a storage vendor targeting mid-sized companies in particular, where the management UI has pretty limited functionality, you don't get CLI access ("It's for your own protection, honest! [Or to secure our intellectual property!]"), AND you are limited to same basic Share/Volume setup/removal and told to "Call support" to request that they SSH in using remote support tunnel to perform any more advanced operations or configuration changes, such as setting up or turning off the replication between multiple systems, OR recover/remount the cluster filesystems after a backend Ethernet failure, or change your frontend IP addresses.

Of course, this Support requires continuous subscription payments, just to be able to make changes to your own configuration, and somewhat exorbitant costs just for software updates as well ------ this turns out to be important, because if something breaks during a software update, no mechanism is available to revert, and you have to call support.

In general: I hate the mentality of a number of vendors that they can push out a product that is not easy to administer, at low prices that will encourage management to buy: use a generic Linux system, but keep Shell/Root access to themselves (no CLI for the end user, just a menu), and require/insist engineers wait on their product support teams as a crutch for the product.

The same applies just as well to products that aren't well documented, or that require voluminous documentation to understand their UI sufficiently to perform basic operations.

Barracuda and Ubiquiti

[charnov]

Barracuda's interface isn't too bad on most of their products considering how complex they are. Ubiquiti's AirOS on their wireless bridges and devices is wonderfully put together.

Also, m0n0wall and Tomato are favorites of mine.