Does anyone on the list have a reference to a good "NOC" calendar? What I
mean by that is a calendar that is view only for the NOC, but looks "good"
on a larger LCD panel display.
Ideally it would automatically rotate on a given schedule (say 6am), and
then show only that days scheduled events, there would be no need for the
NOC to interact with the calendar, just consume the data.
Perhaps it would be color coded to show "DWDM work", vs MPLS work, or even
"new installs". But the idea is that the NOC would have readily accessible
"view only" at a glance. They would not have to load up outlook, go to
calendar, select the MPLS, install etc to see what work is happening.
I was looking into something like this a while back and one thing that
didnt seem to exist but I thought would be cool is if you could have a x86
box or appliance that could take video output of lets say a couple virtual
machines and encode it into a standard TV signal so your average TV with a
builtin tuner and have each VM's display encoded into a different TV
channel. This way you could throw up TV's everywhere and easily change
whats displayed at any time without having to have devices plugged into
every TV.
If this already exists or someone has built anything like this I would love
to hear about it.
- chris
We have large screens in our NOC but these are mostly not used as the NOC operators have the same displays on their multiple monitors at desk. This all depends on what ones use case is and the size/scale which is feasible in your space.
Having a proper procedure (I think we use WebcalNG or something similar) which emails out reminders of each bit of scheduled work, emergency or not to remind the people of what is occurring is seen as easier. There is also a “status page” where well known ongoing issues (e.g.: cable cuts) can be posted. This is on the big screens, so people coming on-shift can see them as they sit down.
Hope this helps,
- Jared
The readability of this would depended entirely on your ticket volume.
What we have run into is that once you get to a point where you have more than 10-15 events per day that you are tracking, then the large screen display becomes pretty useless if you want to show them all.
I attached a weeks worth of display from our ticketing system calendar for reference, and this is only the maintenance tickets displayed in this view.
You would need to aggregate them to a simple number happening that day to show more than a week at a time if you are a high volume shop.
There are boxes that do that, but it’s really not a good solution… Here’s why:
1. TV signals in NTSC max out at 640x480. In ATSC, you get up to 1920x1080.
Many monitors today are capable of 2560x1440 or more.
2. It’s expensive and has few advantages over a traditional KVM switch.
3. An HDMI switcher and graphic cards with HDMI output are not particularly hard
to find these days. DVI->HDMI is also relatively easy if you have trouble getting
HDMI out of the machine. This is a much less expensive solution.
Its fairly trivial to get VM video out to HDMI if you’re willing to dedicate hardware to the
task.
Owen
There are boxes that do that, but it’s really not a good solution… Here’s why:
1. TV signals in NTSC max out at 640x480. In ATSC, you get up to 1920x1080.
Many monitors today are capable of 2560x1440 or more.
2. It’s expensive and has few advantages over a traditional KVM switch.
3. An HDMI switcher and graphic cards with HDMI output are not particularly hard
to find these days. DVI->HDMI is also relatively easy if you have trouble getting
HDMI out of the machine. This is a much less expensive solution.
Its fairly trivial to get VM video out to HDMI if you’re willing to dedicate hardware to the
task.
It is pretty trivial at this point to have a network attached device
serve as a remote display for essentially arbitrary sources.
There's no real point imho in attaching to any machine other than the
one directly in front of you over anything other than ip protocol.