Review Services UX

[skylar-anderson]

Now that we have really awesome metrics exposed for individual services, we should start thinking about reviewing the overall services UX. In particular, I'm thinking we should break services out into individual show pages with the following tabs:

• Scale
• Metrics
• Activity (currently we don't expose service op logs anywhere)
• Releases => Containers (Display container details on app/services template #453)

Since services are already a nested beneath apps, it could get confusing to just nest another layer of tabs beneath the app's navigation.

[skylar-anderson]

@fancyremarker -- curious for your thoughts on what else you'd like to see included in a services UX redesign

[krallin]

We might also want to expose releases (which would also let us show metrics for them — right now we just show the current release')

[skylar-anderson]

@krallin Interesting. What are the metrics for a previous release?

[krallin]

Right now we show the container metrics for the containers that make up the current release. In other words, if you restart the app, the metrics are gone (technically, they aren't, but the dashboard won't fetch them for you), and we'll start showing metrics for the new containers.

The alternative would be to show metrics from past releases on the graph (which we might do depending on customer feedback), but that could become confusing without clarifying that new containers are spun up for each release.

However, if we did expose releases to customers (and the containers that make those up), it starts making sense to aggregate the metrics across multiple releases to give the customer a longer term view of their metrics (since they'll be able to know what those containers are).

This is incidentally why I kept the metrics short-term right now, but medium / long term I think we'd want to keep downsampled metrics for a long time.

(more generally speaking, if we want to show containers, we'll probably need to show releases, since containers are the children of releases, not services)

Hope this clarifies @sandersonet

[skylar-anderson]

Very much so, thanks

[wcpines]

From Rested (probably Salman?)

I will say the UX has one issue for me -- I often click on the environment on the left and expect to see the menu for a given app, stare for a while, and then remember I have to click on an app to see that menu. It looks visually the same as the menu when you're looking at your list of apps. There should be a visual differentiation, but what would be more helpful is if the navigation on the left just had your environments and under those each app. We shouldn't have to drill down twice to get to an app's menu... it's too common of an action.