The single pane of glass is still a commonly used feature that has been promoted in product presentations from various vendors for decades. At points, the feature has been so commonly raised that "single pane of glass" has become an entry in various IT-related Buzzword Bingo card and drinking games.
This makes sense. Everyone wants the feature, so the vendors attempt to deliver... but there is a key difference between product vendors and IT – vendors that, for the most part, place a focus on their own products and ecosystems, while IT is concerned about its own environments. These seldom line up unless a single-vendor environment is in play, and the single-vendor environment is as much a rarity as the single pane of glass itself.
More often than not, we wind up with one overview interface to the wired network, another for the wireless network, another for the security infrastructure, another for storage, another for servers, and another for the cloud. Multiple single panes of glass are the oxymoronic reality of our management infrastructure today.
The Application Program Interface Breakthrough
Automation and orchestration are becoming huge concerns in IT today as our operations begin to scale into the cloud. Doing everything manually via CLIs and GUIs was never an ideal way to manage things and it certainly wasn't scalable to the level that we are beginning to require today. Programmability has become mainstream. With programmability, API interfaces to IT infrastructure are starting to become the primary interface to new products, with the CLIs and GUIs just being clients to the API.
With programmability, information gathering for purposes of creating that multi-product, multivendor single panes of glass becomes easier, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves yet.
The myth of the single panes of glass has been called out before and standardized APIs have been proposed as a solution, but let's face it, we’re not all programmers here.
Bring It Together
To get that single pane of glass, we need to be able to bring the pieces together easily. It starts with standardized access to the base data, but it also needs tools so that it can be more easily put together, such as:
- APIs
- Standardized visualization frameworks (Grafana, Kibana, Graphite, etc.)
- Visualization widgets from product vendors
- Consumable examples
The Whisper in the Wires
We're closer than we've ever been before to the single panes-of-glass, but until we have a more presentation-centric and less product-centric approach, it's still just that little bit out of reach. We need to ask our product vendors to give us the bricks to build our own view of our infrastructure. API access to everything is a beginning but adding higher-level widgets that we can more easily assemble will go a long way to making the single pane of glass a reality.
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