(Editorial) Announcing DMS Clarity Suite 10

After two months of heads-down development, punctuated by several design breakthroughs and a very successful commercial beta cycle, we’re pleased to announce the release of DMS Clarity Suite 10.
This next generation of the DMS Clarity Framework provides us with a robust new platform on which to base a variety of exciting on-site and hosted performance monitoring and management offerings.

Figure 1 – DMS Clarity Suite 10

Highlights include:

• A complete AJAX makeover for a more interactive and responsive site UI (i.e. no more postbacks). 
• A highly componentized architecture, with self-contained charting and analysis widgets that can be detached from the base frameset and configured as stand-alone monitors for system, process and network metrics. 
• Charts are now fully interactive, with each data point serving as a drill-down link to further refine the report parameters. Full chart timeline scrolling/panning support is also included. 
• Additional system and process metrics (Handle Count, GDI Objects) as well as better integration of Custom Counters, including extensive charting support.

Per our existing licensing model, we’re offering DMS Clarity Suite 10 both as a hosted solution – for shops that don’t wish to maintain their own performance monitoring/management framework – and as a traditional, customer deployed solution for on-site scenarios.

We’ll also be offering a subset of the DMS Clarity 10 functionality through our exo.performance.network site. With over 24,000 users, the exo.performance.network is the world’s largest repository of real-world metrics data as collected from Windows PCs and servers from around the globe.

The new DMS Clarity 10 functionality will be offered through our forthcoming Windows Pulse service, which will serve as a direct replacement for – and major capabilities upgrade to – our existing Clarity 9-based widgets and tools.

We’re also providing a comprehensive “dashboard” solution as part of Windows Pulse. Dubbed the “Pulse Pad,” this free-form, AJAX-based UI will allow users to configure and “dock” individual widgets to a persistent presentation “canvas” that will preserve both the widget configuration parameters and on-screen layout between sessions. Here’s a sneak peak:

Figure 2 – The Windows “Pulse Pad”

Users will be able to re-arrange and position (drag & drop) widgets at will, as well as “undock” them for use as stand-alone monitoring objects. Support for multiple pads, each with its own set of up to 10 discrete widgets, is also in the pipeline. We hope to have a public beta version available by the end of June, and the formally launch the service later this summer.