Visual Overviews are powerful and visually appealing tools for navigating, monitoring, and managing your entire infrastructure. However, since they typically contain a lot of information and different types of data, it can be challenging to strike the right balance between complete and cluttered.
In this new video series, we provide feedback on real-life Visual Overview submissions, highlighting its strengths and areas of improvements. Our goal is to help you create Visual Overviews that are intuitive, organised, and effective.
We kick off the series with an amazing Visual Overview submitted by Tommy Hexeberg from Telenor—earning him a whopping 250 DevOps Points. Watch the video below for the full feedback session, or soak up the key takeaways below.
6 tips to immediately buff up your Visual Overviews
1. Enhance Reusability and Maintainability:
– Group shapes that share the same object to improve reusability and ease of maintenance.
– Utilize local variables on the page level for recurring shape data components. Possibilities are the InitVar and Execute page data.
2. Optimize Visuals with HoverType and Theming:
Apply HoverType=Geometry and explore theming options at the page level to enhance visual aesthetics and interactivity.
3. Refine Trend Graphs with “NoWildcard” Option:
When dealing with specific table rows, leverage the “NoWildcard” option in trend graphs for more performant data display. Learn more
4. Streamline Layouts for Efficiency:
If performance permits, create separate pages for frequently recurring panels or sections. This streamlines the design, making it more reusable and easier to manage. Leverage the VdxPage functionality to achieve this.
5. Utilize Pages for In-Line Tab Controls:
When aiming to create in-line tab controls, consider creating and embedding pages instead of relying solely on show/hide conditions. You can configure tab controls within the software product or design custom solutions using variables to switch between pages.
6. Trim Text for a cleaner look:
Where relevant, employ the TextTrimming feature to ensure more clean text display. Learn more
Get in on the action! Send us your Visual Overview solutions and we will feature them in our video series. Don’t miss this chance to showcase your work, get valuable insights from the experts, and earn some DevOps Points!
Great session Toon! I really like the approach to break down existing use cases and see how they are put together. Very useful for inspiration for your own Visios. Cant wait for the next.
Around the 5:30 mark there was the comment about using a variable for the element where you reuse the element many times.
I tried this by adding to the Page Shape Data:
InitVar = Switch2Element=samuelst-switch2
Then on the shape I want to represent the Element:
Element = [pagevar:Switch2Element]
Variable = Switch2Element
But cannot get that element shape to show at all.
What am I missing?
figured this out
InitVar should be Switch2Element:samuelst-switch2
Element should be [var:Switch2Element]
now works 🙂
Glad you could figure it out Sam, that is indeed the solution. For reference if anyone else is looking for it: https://docs.dataminer.services/user-guide/Basic_Functionality/Visio/session_variables/Initializing_a_session_variable.html
Thanks for watching and I hope it was helpful!