Features include modern design, customization options, greater speed and responsiveness

The GlobalNOC Software and Systems team is happy to announce the release of the GlobalNOC Database Next-Generation UI rewritten to utilize our newly developed GNUI (GlobalNOC User Interface) React component library!

Don’t fret! The user interface you’re familiar with won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. This new interface will be deployed alongside the existing interface. If at any point you hit an issue or need to utilize functionality not yet implemented in the new user interface, you can easily go back to the current interface. (More details on this below.)

We do hope you’ll take some time to check out the new interface and tell us what you think! Below are some cool new things we hope you will enjoy when using the new interface.

Modern design

• The new U.I. employs design paradigms and best practices seen across the web in recent years.

Customization

• The new U.I. let’s you alternate between Light and Dark mode in its settings dialog as well as modifying the applications setting’s you’re used to like the time zone presented in the application.

Speed and responsiveness

• Being built on top of React allows us to take advantage of its ability to only rerender the parts of the page it needs to as information changes. This combined with taking advantage of the data caching ability of browsers allow us to achieve greater levels of speed and responsiveness in the U.I.

Quicker development and iteration cycles

• The React library consolidates many industry best practices and common design paradigms into a well abstracted interfaces that can be used by developers to easily implement solutions and get them out the door quickly. Utilizing this framework and the reusable component library built on top of it, GNUI, will allow us to implement your requests and make them available to you in your instance of the GlobalNOC Database as well as our other user interfaces that begin utilizing GNUI more quickly.

Short term, our team will be focusing on achieving feature parity in the new interface with the old interface. Once we’ve accomplished that goal we will then begin looking at more in-depth changes to the U.I., revisiting long-standing components and re-imagining how they might be reimplemented to better serve you in managing your networks.

To do this we’ll be looking for feedback from all of you. This can be anything from ideas on how something might work differently, general features requests, or issues discovered when using the new U.I. More detailed information on this can be found below.

Along with information on how to submit feedback we’ve also included some other common questions we anticipated to receive along with the answers. We hope you are all as excited for the release of the new user interface as we are!

1. How do I submit feedback for the new User Interface? 
   The tool provides an Open Ticket option in the main drop down menu located in on the right side of the application’s header. 
   
   
   
   However, if you’d just like to discuss options or kick ideas around before submitting a ticket feel free to start a conversation with us (GlobalNOC Software & Systems Engineering) or other members of the GlobalNOC community. The #user-group-general or sys-pub channels are good places to start general conversations like this.
2. When will the new interface be made available to my GlobalNOC Database instance? 
   We will be deploying the new interface early Monday, April 3, 2023. Once we’ve completed the deployment we’ll follow up in the #user-general-channel as well as the corresponding mailing list to let you all know it’s available for use.
3. How do I switch between the new user Interface and the current one? 
   Links will be made available in the Message of the Day of the application just below the header. One will be available in the current U.I. to take you to the new application.
   
   
   
   Similarly one will be available in the new U.I. to take you back to the current application.
   
   
   
   
4. How does this relate to the Database U.I. announcement in 2021? 
   You may remember a similar announcement made in 2021 seen in this blog post. That announcement and this one are two sides of the same coin. As the blog post described, we began researching new frontend technologies being used in the industry and eventually landed on React as being the core framework used in the next generation of U.I.s.
   
   Since then, we’ve learned a lot about architecting frontend applications using the React framework. We’ve taken that knowledge and distilled it into the GNUI React component library for use across all of our frontend applications. This will be the first release of the GlobalNOC Database Next-Generation UI that has been refactored to utilize this core library of GNUI components.