From EOC to Orion Server Non-Stop

Gaining Direct Access to the Orion Console from EOC without a Login Screen

Orion Enterprise Operations Console provides a console for aggregating data from multiple Orion servers. For instance, an EOC Top 10 lists includes nodes from different Orion servers into a single list.

When the user clicks on one of those nodes, EOC launches the Node Details page for the target Orion…except for the first time you access that Orion web console is a given session. The first time you access a target Orion, the user is asked for login credentials for that Orion, which some users find really annoying.

Why do we do ask for it? We do it for security reasons. We assume that most users would not want credentials being passed in the open. And while that may be true, after we shipped EOC 1.0, many users told us that within their firewall, this kind of security “violation” was really no violation at all. Please, they asked, could you just provide an auto-login feature so that users would never be asked for Orion credentials.

In EOC 1.1, we did just this. If you go to EOC > Settings > Admin > Web Console Settings, you will see a screen that asks if you want to “Allow Orion auto-login”. It’s still off by default, but flip that switch, and auto-login is activated.

Unfortunately, I have had quite a few users of EOC 1.1 who complained to me or to Support that they wanted this feature. When I told them that it was already implemented, they were surprised. As a product team, we were a little disappointed because a feature the users can’t find is like no feature at all. Still, rather than cry in our beer, we made a small change in EOC 1.2 to make it easier to find. We moved the setting from Web Console settings to Manage Orion Servers, a section that every EOC user visits at some point.

You may be asking, what is this EOC 1.2? Is it GA yet? No, but we have just released the EOC 1.2 Release Candidate (RC), which will be in your Customer Portal if you are current on maintenance. Once we get some feedback on the RC, General Availability won’t be far behind.