ITRS Group

Driving innovation for real-time monitoring through web browsers

With the continued growth in cloud computing the web browser is increasingly being used in a business context as a visualisation tool for a host of applications. Typically, individuals log into an application and pull information from a source that is then presented in the browser. 

Yet, pushing information to web browsers particularly on a real-time monitoring basis has previously proved very difficult. In fact, this has only been achieved by a user or administrator logging on to a page which then continually polls the source data and refreshes the browser to present the relevant information.

WebSocket improving visualisation

At ITRS we are making some great advances in our ‘Visualisation’ Programme using WebSockets, now part of the draft specification in HTML 5 and supported natively in most browsers. These recent innovations will enable us to provide both operations teams and ultimately business user’s access to critical up to the second information through their web browser.

Overcoming the browser challenge

This is not without challenges and anybody who is developing with HTML 5 WebSockets will know that this doesn’t work in every browser. The combination of using WebSockets and cutting edge technology from Kaazing mentioned in a previous blog has enabled us to overcome these issues.

ITRS clients will soon have the advantages of thin-client, browser-based access, through Geneos Web Montage, but without impacting their user experience. This will deliver numerous benefits at infrastructure, operations and business levels - making critical information available anywhere.

It will also make it easier to deploy, where previously this was achieved by downloading an application on a desktop, it can now be deployed across a server. This means lower deployment, maintenance and support costs.

Summary

Pushing Geneos information to web browsers is will be quicker, easier and more flexible using WebSockets. It also creates massive opportunities to give increased visibility and access to information in different locations, as well as on the move.

We still have plenty of interesting things being developed as part of the visualisation programme, so watch this space. We’ll keep you posted with more blogs in the future.

Elliott Miller, Senior Developer, ITRS Group