Entity Explorer

A single, simplified experience to search, filter, manage & drill down on entities.

Enterprise Web Design

01 Background

Users, especially system administrators, need a single place to view, filter and bulk change all of their monitored entities or "things" in their environment.

Team & Roles

• Susan & Jennifer (UX Design)

• Carley (UX Research) 

02 Problem 

Problem for Customers

• Each product has its own management page and there isn't a central place to see all of your entities in an environment.

Problem for SolarWinds

• Multiple (old) technologies are used for current management pages, which creates tech debt

• Entities and their respective metrics & properties aren't always aligned to one another (so we needed a unified entity model)

03 Process

As a team, we collaborated & whiteboarded virtually using Miro.

04 Design

Old UI

New UI

First iteration

The first design addressed the need to access different entity types in a single view via the dropdown.

But it had several issues:

• Scalability: Users could have 1000s of entities in their environment, so there would be huge page load time. Also, due to the different entity types, there would be "gaps" in the table due to inapplicable properties

• Usability: Users complained that the dropdown was not visible.

Second iteration

In the second iteration, we had a moonshot goal - addressing the previous issues, plus adding in another layer to show overall environment status via roll-up of entity status.

Usability: We changed the dropdown into a list, and placed the list of entity types in a more prominent location. We also made the search bar larger.

05 Validation & Challenges

User Research

In our treejack survey, we found that users had a hard time knowing that they could access entity information in 'Entity Explorer'

For example, we asked the question:

You've been asked to provide a report of the top 25 highest bandwidth interfaces. Where would you go to do this?'

This was the poorest performing task, with only 1/10 users getting the question correct.

Through this survey, we saw the need to provide an onboarding experience to show users new navigation sections, and explain what tasks can be accomplished in each section.

06 Further Explorations

It would also be interesting to explore a 'lite' version of the entity explorer that can be added into a dashboard view.

Or even append a map view of the entities to show related entities (ex: children or parent nodes) and their statuses.