{"id":231,"date":"2020-04-04T21:53:20","date_gmt":"2020-04-04T19:53:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/metaworks.eu\/wordpress\/?p=231"},"modified":"2020-04-08T17:02:04","modified_gmt":"2020-04-08T15:02:04","slug":"tool-integration-visualization-whats-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metaworks.eu\/wordpress\/tool-integration-visualization-whats-next\/","title":{"rendered":"Blind Men, Elephants, Tool Integration and Visualization \u2013 What’s next?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A group of blind men heard about a strange animal, which had been brought to the town. It was called an “Elephant<\/em>“, but none of them knew its shape or form. They said: “Let us inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable”. So, they went. The first, whose hand landed on the trunk, said “It is like a giant snake”. The second, whose hand reached the elephant’s ear, claimed it seemed like a kind of fan. The third, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon the side said the elephant, “is a wall”. Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.<\/p>Indian fable<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It seems we all have a tendency to claiming to know the truth, based on a usually very limited, subjective experience. Within our limited perception, with the importance of considering context, we forget that other limited, subjective experiences may be equally true. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This blog post is about tool integration and new approaches to visualization of information flow. All I intended to do was to apply the 3 ways of DevOps and take them a little further. However, it’s been a while since I came up with an unwieldy academic article, so here’s a made-up title for readers with matriculation backgrounds:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Towards an integrated framework for shorter feedback cycles<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

State of the Union<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Tool Integration<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

There are several integration solutions on the market, from basic nightly CSV exports to internally developed API-based integrations, from ChatOps approaches such as Atomist<\/a> to large-scale middleware-like solutions such as the Tasktop Integration Hub<\/a> … not to mention ESBs and message brokers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it is quite fair to assume that integration of two or more software tools is more or less a solved problem. We can make data flow<\/em> between tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How about the visualization of data?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Visualization<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In IT operations, monitoring solutions like Nagios have long been able to visualize how the infrastructure is doing – almost in real time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Kibana<\/a> (and Elasticsearch\/Logstash under the hood) we can not only analyze the UP\/DOWN state of a host, disk usage and CPU load, but also visualize and trend various structured data – usually the log files generated by our services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And last but not least, tools such as eazyBI<\/a> and Tasktop Viz<\/a> can visualize whole process chains and business data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While an integration <\/em>optimizes the flow of data and a visualization <\/em>gives feedback, we currently have no direct relation between the two, as it’s different tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having the Cake and Eating it<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

So far so semi-good, as this breaks the “Experimentation Principle” from the 3 Ways of DevOps<\/em> (remember Gene Kim’s book<\/a>?).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First Way<\/strong>: Work always flows in one direction \u2013 downstream. Second Way<\/strong>: Create, shorten and amplify feedback loops. Third Way<\/strong>: Continued experimentation, in order to learn from mistakes, and achieve mastery.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

We will see a<\/em> change at some point in the future, without knowing where it came from. Just like the blind men in the fable, we lack context!
For example,<\/p>\n\n\n\n