VMware Discovery Tag Map

Year: 2018

 

Overview

Cloud admins manage thousands to hundreds of thousands of workloads spread across many different public and private cloud environments. Tags in the form of Key = Value pairs are used to create categories / tags such as BU =  marketing  to help organize resources more effectively.   Today the consumption of tags has been largely search based leaving the user no visual way to understand the usage of tags in a single cloud or across multiple cloud environments. 

Key Use Cases

  • User needs visibility into related key: value pare tags

  • Provide the user with a consolidated view of tags that are being consumed across cloud environments.

  • Provide the user visibility into the distribution of resources across the tags.

  • Provide the user visibility into untagged resources.

Solution

The the basics of VMware cloud services map starts with a mind mapping model, with the visual design inspired from subway maps, to display relationship between keys,  values, clouds,  and resource types. The thickness of the lines represent the relative number of resources contained with in a node. The coloring is used to represent the cloud types. When a tag is consistent across more than one cloud then the nodes and lines are blue, when the map brakes down to a single cloud then the lines and nodes change color to use the color representing that cloud.  To help with scale issues the visualization is collapsed down to just showing the keys and values by default. When the user selects a node from the visualization it expands to review further details as well as updated the information shown in the right hand panel. The node will stay expanded until it is clicked again. This allows the user to expand and compare multiple nodes.

My role

I identified the problem, worked out and defined what the user problems where as well as identified the UX issues that needed to be considered. I developed the initial concept as well as iterated on the concept to come to working design that could be used by developers to build a proof of concept that could be used for user testing.