Forum Discussion

Vsevolod_Petrov's avatar
Vsevolod_Petrov
Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
Oct 30, 2013

big-ip web ui improvement

Hi!

 

The BIG-IP provides a good option to configure device by using web interface. But sometimes classic dropdown menus starts bothering me, because you should always be aware to move your cursor straight between upper and lower menus while pointing to the submenu on the right, in case you missed it you are on the other menu already.

 

It would be very nice if F5 could improve dropdown menus with the mechanism described in the article on the link below.

 

http://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega-dropdown

 

What do you think about it? Whether this measure will increase the level of user satisfaction?

 

BIG-IP
dropdown
improvement
webui
xui
  • Hamish's avatar
    Hamish
    Icon for Cirrocumulus rankCirrocumulus
    Oct 30, 2013

    Mmm... Some of it would definately do with some work. While the interface works, sometimes it requires a bit of thinking. Currently I have a screen that appears to be sized just right that on some of my bigip's I have to resize the browser window so that drop down menus (e.g. System -> Logs) manage to drop the bottom menu items ABOVE the bottom of the window. It's annoyingly inconsistent in that IF you have a long list of something in the main window (e..g All your VS's) then you can scroll the whole widow down enough to get the dropdown visible. But sometimes you don't (e.g. A test bigip without hundres of handy VS's you can scroll with).

     

    There's also other features... e.g.

     

    • When using EM if you have a really long list of something (devices) and select one, you then have to scroll AALLL the way to the bottom to hit the 'go' button... At which point you are at the bottom of a suddenly blank window, because you have to scroll manually all the way to the top to see the update
    • Graphs that update by refreshing the whole window... I like refresh in place so my window doesn't scroll to the top all the time on refresh, so losing my place where I was looking at a graph half way down
    • Flash... Grr... Most of my clients don't have flash on their PC's. So things like analytics don't work.
    • Inconsistency of appearance. Some stats are RRDTool (perf stats on BigIP base GUI). Then you get EM and the stats it produces are stick lines with stats from the mysql database. Same goes for configs between BigIP (LTM) and things like APM (Especially when configuring SSO for HTML forms).
    • Back to analytics... Flash based graphs? What's wrong with RRDTool? It's great. Looks good, automatically consolidates older stats, fast, easy to use, easy to update in place!!!
    • Stats again... Basic unit stats are rrdtool. And we get a long history of them with good resolution (Although it would be good to get more control other than last 3 hours, last day etc. Kind of like cacti allows perhaps). But with analytics I get stats averaged over about 4 hours when looking at a single day. What use are a 4 hour average in a day? Not much to me I'm afraid.
    • Naming inconsistencies... Classes vs DataGroups... Enough said.

    Sorry... Button pushed there... Possibly wandering off topic a bit... I stopped before I put my whole annoyance list up...