Overview

One of the biggest challenges of providing data visualization to a variety of consumers is choosing the ideal deployment technology for your organization. There are many factors to consider, including optimizing the end user experience, hardware costs, maintenance costs, performance, scalability and security.

This section is designed to help you understand the various options, consider the pros and cons of each, and choose the optimal deployment.

This section contains the following:

§        “Deployment Options” on page 845

§        “Application Deployment” on page 846

§        “Browser Deployment” on page 847

Deployment Options

One major advantage of RTView is that it is a portable delivery platform. This means that all displays, including graphical elements, data attachments, drill downs, functions, substitutions and security settings, are portable to any deployment option - without reengineering. This facilitates implementation and rollout since development, testing, and production systems can use different deployment technologies without significant porting costs. If situations change in your organization and you would like to choose a different deployment option, you can readily do so.

SL keeps current on the latest information delivery technologies, such as browser and portal options, scalable data distribution, application servers and security. This ensures that the most suitable option for your enterprise remains deployable with minimal costs. Currently there are five options for RTView deployment.

If you have already chosen your deployment option, you can go directly to the deployment process from the following links.

Two Application Deployment Options:

“Application with Served Data - Manual Deployment Process” on page 887 

“Application with Direct Data Connection - Manual Deployment Process” on page 894

Four Browser Deployment Options:

“Rich Client Browser with Served Data” on page 901

“Rich Client Browser with Direct Data Connection” on page 901 

“Thin Client Browser with Served Data” on page 930

“Thin Client Browser with Direct Data Connection” on page 930

Thin Client Browser with Direct Data ConnectionRTView is comprised of data sources, a client and possibly a server. Figure 1 is a high level illustration of the five deployment scenarios.

Figure 1: Deployment Overview

Application Deployment

In cases where the information delivered is of a critical, real-time, actionable nature, it may be desirable to deploy information via an application. For instance, infrastructure monitoring applications and critical operational dashboards can have a dedicated platform which only runs this application. End users can focus on monitoring and responding to the delivered information. In these cases it may not be desirable to deliver the information in a browser which might encourage an end user to browse away from critical information.

There are two application deployment options, Application with Served Data and Application with Direct Data Connection, as illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Application Deployment Overview

Browser Deployment

The most common deployment option chosen is a browser based deployment. Browsers are chosen for several reasons: they are a familiar tool for navigating to multiple sources of information, they are a standard application already resident on most enterprise platforms, and new information sources can be provided to end users without the additional IT expense of installing specialized software at each client.

There are three browser deployment options: Rich Client Browser with Served Data, Rich Client Browser with Direct Data Connection, and Thin Client Browser.

Rich Client Browser Deployment

The Rich Client Browser solution has become popular because it has faster processing abilities for interactions that are critical in some use cases. This is because more of the processing of interactive displays is done on the client machine via applet technology.

Most browsers only support minimal Java technology, making it necessary to install a Java plug-in on the client machines. In IT situations where the installation of a plug-in is not a problem, or it is already standard procedure, the Rich Client Browser deployment may be the best choice. However, in cases where installation of a Java plug-in is not desirable, the Thin Client Browser deployment would be the correct choice.

There are two Rich Client Browser deployment options, Rich Client Browser with Served Data and Rich Client Browser with Direct Data Connection, as illustrated in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Rich Client Browser Deployment Overview

Thin Client Browser Deployment

Thin Client Browser deployments are popular with IT departments that prefer the ease of deployment and maintenance achieved by this technology. With this option, the client need only have a standard browser installed to access the RTView dashboards. This deployment requires the installation of the Display Server which uses AJAX technology to provide interactive dashboards to any standard browser. Recent advances in this technology have enabled the Display Server to perform comparably to Rich Client Browser deployments in most use cases.

As illustrated in Figure 4, there are two Thin Client Browser deployment options: Thin Client Browser with Served Data and Thin Client Browser with Direct Data Connection.

Figure 4: Thin Client Browser Deployment Overview

Choosing The Right Deployment

There are advantages and disadvantages to each type of RTView deployment. Depending on your environment, there are at most three decisions to make. To make it easier, we provide a step-by-step guide to help you consider the pros and cons of each scenario, and readily determine which deployment is the right one for your organization.

Figure 5 illustrates your choices, starting with the first decision; whether to have an application or browser deployment.

Figure 5: Deployment Decision Process

Let's get started!

Application Versus Browser Deployment

There are a variety of differences between application and browser deployments detailed in the table below. However, the major drivers in making a choice are usually based on two things: optimal user experience and cost factors.

In the majority of situations the browser is the most popular deployment option. The browser is seen as the easiest way to maintain information access to a wide variety of users, and it is a well known end user application. These factors can reduce costs in deployment, maintenance and training.

Yet in small, localized deployments, the application choice may still be the most cost effective. This is because in its simplest form it does not require an application server. The application option is also the obvious choice when a browser environment might lend to end users browsing away from critical information, such as in critical 24/7 monitoring solutions.

Pros and Cons 

Choose “Application Deployment” 

Choose “Browser Deployment”