If this blog post seems a little… more off kilter than usual, it may have something to do with the fact that I’m totally wiped.
See, I bought an IKEA bed and assembled it by myself last night. Now, I won’t say that it wasn’t time-consuming, but apart from the part where I had to run to WalMart at 1:30 in the morning for an bradawl*, the directions were simple and easy to understand with the little mute Swedish IKEA guy showing me what to do and what not to do, without having to use a single English word, and I was able to get the whole thing up and assembled despite increased eye-blurriness, finger clumsiness, and yawn, er… yawniness as the night went on.
Now, I know that network engineers and administrators are no strangers to no-sleep late hours and even to middle-of-the-night trips to the data center – something goes wrong with the server, you get woken up by your pager, you try to fix it from home, but you can’t, and you have to run down to the data center, and end up staring at command lines until six in the morning, at which point you start to hear spooky voices in the exhaust fans of the rack-mounted computers. (It sounds something like: “Brrrrrrrrnosleepforyourrrrrrrrrrr”)
When these things happen, there are two things that make a world of difference: simple, easy-to-understand and use tools, and heavily caffeinated beverages.
I like Mountain Dew, and those mocha/expressos with chips in them from Starbucks. Hold on. I’m going to get one before I crash. I’ll be right back.
Still there? Anyway, good UI design can make or break a network engineer’s sanity in those wee morning hours. As networks become more complex, network engineers need tools that are easy to use. Your brain does not run at maximum capacity in that deprived state and you need all the brain cells you can muster to think about the networking stuff that you’re good at, not to have to remember a whole bunch of arcane commands and directions to get to the information you need.
“Visibility into core metrics” doesn’t just mean that the core metrics are available if you can find them. Visibility – true visibility – means that there’s nothing obscuring the information you need when you need it. That’s why UI design is extremely important for networking tools.
*yeah, yeah, I know, but there are times in your life when it’s 1:30 a.m. and you desperately need a bradawl.
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