1. Source View
1.1. Concept
The source view is, as its name indicates, a view dedicated to a particular source. It displays the most important characteristics and several metrics of the said source for one day at a time. The source view is mainly targeted at support teams which can have, at a glance, the necessary information to potentially identify, locate and start to address an issue reported on a desktop. The content of the view can be completely customized to help target specific issues.
1.2. Using the source view
To open the source view, you have to right-click on a source and select Display source view (shortcut: double-click on the source).
The source view for the corresponding source is then displayed in a new tab:
The upper part of the view is dedicated to the characteristics of the source. It summarizes hardware information as well as other useful information information. On the lower part are displayed the different metrics that have been configured (see the section about customization for more details): each row represent a metric over time. The displayed time period is by default the current day but you can navigate through the days with the left and right buttons located on both sides of the time scale. If many metrics are defined and they do not fit on one single screen, you can scroll them using the up and down buttons located on top and bottom of the metric names (shortcut: use your mouse scroll wheel). You can click on any bar (shift and ctrl-click to select multiple bars) to select it and display its value.
You can then see the details by right-clicking of it (or them) and selecting Drill-down (shortcut: double-click on the bar):
1.3. Customizing the source view
The metrics displayed in the source view are investigations that have been especially activated for the source view. When opening the view, the Finder looks at all activated investigations and uses them as metrics. The order of the metrics is determined by their order in the investigation tree; so, if you want to reorder the metrics, you simply need to reorder their corresponding investigations (tip: it's advised to keep all investigations configured for the source view in a single folder so it's easier to manage and retrieve them).
1.3.1. Creating a metric
To illustrate the metric creation, we are going to create one displaying the network response time of Microsoft Outlook; it may be useful if some people are complaining of that issue. As we explained above, a metric is an investigation that is especially configured and activated for the source view. The steps are therefore the following:
- Create a new investigation: to be used for the source view, the investigation needs to be defined on a source and the source ID as its only parameter condition. Other conditions can of course be added: in our example, we want to focus on Microsoft Outlook so we add two conditions on executable (one for Outlook, the other for Outlook Express) linked by an OR condition (one may also use conditions on applications instead of executables).
Right-click on the newly created investigation in the Investigations panel and select Add to source view
Select the metric to display. In our example, we need to choose network response.
- Display the source view for one source: the new metric appears in the list. If a source view is already displayed, you just need to refresh the tab (with the reload button) to display the new metric.
