Working with Widgets

Had some time to play around with the new RightScale dashboard widgets. Now, another group worked on these UI treats, so I am not patting myself on the back when I say that these things are super cool!

I used a combination of built-in widgets and some that others have written to make a custom landing page that gives me a great overview in a glance.

Doing R&D I've got so many servers launching and terminating throughout the days, weeks, months... sometimes it is hard to keep track.  Finally when things do slow down I find a server or two that's been running for two months -- doing nothing!!  So I decided to write my first widget.  Basically it visualizes my running servers and their up time.  It looks like this:

Yup, pretty basic. But now I won't forget to shut down that long running server again.

The expanded view gives you probably all the other info you might want to know: ServerTemplate, Deployment, CPU graph, etc.  The only trick, is that you need to add your initials to each server you launch (a good practice to get into in a multi-user account).

AFAIK, there's no real way to share these outside your account, so here's the code.  Add here are the other settings:

I hope you find these things as useful as I do.  The RightScale widgets are implemented using Liquid markup.  Find more information about what you can do with RightScale widgets on the support site.