Where’s the new stuff?

  by Adrian Long | 20 Jan 2012 | Permalink | ADDM, User Experience

Picture the scene: You’ve upgraded to a new version of ADDM, expecting a whole bundle of new features. You fire up a browser, log in to your appliance and fire up the dashboard, only to see… a complete absence of the shiny new bits. You go and check, and see that, yes, the upgrade did actually happen. But the new dashboard widgets just aren’t there. They’ve not shown up, and you feel lied to because stuff that’s supposed to be easy seems to lack a convenient jumping off point.

“Surely the ADDM team wouldn’t have just forgotten to give us a place to start?”, you think to yourself.

Well, you’re correct – one of the things we’re quite keen on is giving people clear and simple jumping off points for any new features. We like putting new features and components in the UI in places where you’ll already be looking. So that when you’re trying to do something, you’ll easily find the new user interface components that can help you. The natural instinct to think “hang on, that wasn’t there before” is a good thing when it comes to trying to encourage our users to explore and experiment with new features. It makes people curious, so they investigate and mess about with things until they understand what they do.

But sometimes, the new stuff just doesn’t show up for some people. They hear about it, and see it in the new videos, but it all remains curiously absent from their appliance’s UI. If you’re one of those people, the chances are that you’ve got some customization in place that’s stopping the new stuff from appearing. At some point, somebody has written some custom report definitions that override the normal dashboard channels. Because we respect those customizations across the upgrade process, It’s possible that new things might not appear because doing so would overrule your customization.

This recently came up as a topic in the forum, and it looks like an issue which is only going to get more common as the product advances. So I thought it was something worth talking about a little, just to make sure you don’t lose out on the new stuff.

Now, the best advice from the forum thread doesn’t come from me, but from Mark Wilkinson, so I’m just going to quote him here on how to rectify this:

Hi folks,

If you are not seeing the new Application Mapping channel, I suspect that you are on an upgraded appliance, and at some point a customised definition of the Applications page has been created, which is therefore overriding the current page layout.

Take a look in /usr/tideway/data/custom/reports and look for a definition in one or more of the reports definition files with a .xml suffix. It might look something like this:

<page name=“ApplicationHome”>
    <channel>Applications.Channel.Summary</channel>
    <channel>Impact.Channel.ApplicationImpact</channel>
</page>

If there is something like this, it is overriding the defined UI and hiding any product updates. There may be other page definitions too, doing the same thing.

The content of data/custom/reports is all customisation; if you don’t know what it’s customising, you could start by moving all the xml files somewhere else and restart the services, which will return everything to default, and therefore reveal the current UI. Then if necessary, you can selectively re-apply any required customisations.

We’ll investigate how we can at least detect and highlight any potential overrides like this during upgrade, though it probably won’t make the next release.

To close off, I’d like to reiterate Mark’s parting comment. It might not happen straight away, and I can’t comment on when you’ll see any changes, but we’re going to look into how customizations like this interact with upgrades. If you have any thoughts on that, feel free to drop by the forums to let us know.