I'm on an iPad so I'm not sure of the whole experience but one thing that came to mind, especially given the "faded" UI is that clicking outside the presentation should allow the user to shortcut to the end and jump right in, maybe with a message along the lines of "ok, jump right in...to continue to intro, just click here"
Can you share a bit about how the text overlay/intro was made? Might be a cool project in and of itself...
The real time graphs look great.....D3 + cube/node?
If they're cube related, definitely the best i've seen for it.
Note, I'm only half done with my coffee so...you never know.
Update: I just came back to the site and launched the model seems like the link is now http://windows.graphdat.com/agent/GraphdatAgent.exe which works...
Over the past year I switched to using git to deploy almost all of my apps & services and it is just so much better than what I was doing before (various cobbled together crap).
I even have git repos for things like my servers' .bashrc file ... you'd be surprised how useful that is.
Yes there are tools like puppet & chef and whatnot, but I think of those as better suited to dependencies than your actual code with its higher push frequency.
[UPDATE] might as well talk about how we do this:
In order to use "git push" from a development box to push to remote servers (rather than having them pull from a repo, which requires keeping a git repo accessible from your production boxes, which might not be convenient), you need two things:
1. On the server, run this:
git config receive.denyCurrentBranch ignore
2. On the server, write a .git/hooks/post-receive and make it executable. Its contents should be:
#!/bin/sh
# NB: hooks execute in the .git dir (not the repo root)
# and GIT_DIR is set to '.'; either one prevents "git checkout" from working
unset GIT_DIR
cd ..
git checkout -f # force checkout the current branch
I have to think about it a bit more deeply to make a thoughtful comment regarding the product. However, I did catch a few little things that you can fix:
1) http://www.graphdat.com/pricing, "Don’t need history, than it's all free." should be "Don’t need history, then it's all free."
2) I appreciate your tag line: "Remember all servers get all features, always." but I think punctuation would really make it sticks: "Remember: all servers get all features--always!" I'm not sure, but I love it it and I want this to be even more impactful.
3) https://dashboard.graphdat.com/landing page, other than signup/login perhaps a "learn more" button/link? I am a paranoid guy, especially when it comes to installing stuff on my server, so I would want to learn more about the product before even hitting the signup button.
As a developer, I love the product and your presentation. http://www.graphdat.com/images/img1.png should be replaced with new screenshots from the current look. What graphing tool are you using? Definitely love to learn more about you guys. Perhaps a developer's blog?
Again, congratulations on a great job well done so far and looking forward to seeing and learning more about you guys.
-V.
Just curious, did you have to write all the graphing yourselves or did you use a library?
Is your retention period limited to three months or is that just the amount of data you have on hand ?
Also configuration seems to be a bit lacking, is there a way I can change the graphs I have on the screen or select different metrics ( for example I want things like Swap or CPU Wait time ) , and I don't see a way to ad din my own devices. Are those just limits of me only looking at the demo or is that work pending ?
Either way great job looks really slick.
We're still debating how the UX for configuration will look, as soon as we figure it out then we can start work on that :)
Graphdat is a very intense graphing experience and to pull it off,
we need a browser that meets some minimum requirements.
To use Graphdat, you need to upgrade your browser
1) On the walkthrough my browser wasn't quite wide enough so the text was scrolling off the window. Maybe scale the font size down a bit based on window size if you don't want to deal with wrapping?
2) My first thought before giving it a go and having some reassurance on how this will impact the network/cpu on my server. I know the answer is "it will be negligible", but having it called out specifically reassures me it has been thought of. Same goes with security. As a matter of fact having the agent be open source seems like it would go a long ways there. (doesn't seem like those are the crown jewels but perhaps they are)
Anyways, congrats on the launch, super cool. Next time I have a bit of time I'll definitely try installing it on one of our servers and checking it out.
BTW, your SSL seems to be off. I tried to reach https://graphdat.com and Chrome showed me an error saying your certificate was configured for *.graphdat.com and not for graphdat.com.
EDIT: Played with it for sometime and here's another thought. In the How it works page, each step should link to a page showing how to perform it. Same for the various server and OS logos. I clicked the nginx logo expecting to get directions to install the nginx plugin and instead it sent me to nginx homepage.
That said, I'm not sure your pricing is aligned correctly. Check out Patio11's excellent article on SaaS pricing (with a company that is in a similar space): http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/