I was stuck in a bit of traffic yesterday and I got thinking how lacking the CarPlay and Android Auto eco system really is. Most people really just use it for maps and their favourite audio client like Spotify, Audible etc. And there is not a bunch else.

Is that because there is no market for other apps, safety concerns? market size? who knows.

Anyway, how about this for an idea? Introducing......
(note if it is not obvious this is a Photoshop mockup..)

Veeam Backup Dashboard - Auto Edition

I have included a few things which I think are important but really this would be different for everyone so making this customisable would be important.

With these types of dashboards I always find that a visual representation of data works best especially in this context. At a glance you can quickly see any areas of concern and follow up on these when in the office.

What have I included on my concept board?

  • Job status, a last 11 days view of jobs, green dots represent successful jobs orange and red are warnings and failures
  • Throughput averaged across all jobs - this would require a bit of heavy lifting via the APIs or PowerShell to get these values out but certainly possibly. You could easily see if things are getting faster or slower
  • Last 24h completion rate on jobs, is everything working? are jobs still running?
  • Capacity free on backup repositories so you can see how full things are looking
  • Capacity tier and deep archive, utilisation

You could go on forever and really whats important to me might not be important to someone else. In fact if I am honest this would not even be my dashboard but I figure this would be a nice starting point as a generic view for someone with a single backup server environment.

And we haven't even got into the use cases around Veeam ONE alerts, push notifications .... oh boy.

What do you think?

Veeam aside, do you think that there is a future for apps like these in the CarPlay and Android Auto eco system? food for thought.

And considering Veeam would you use something like this in the car while stuck on the commute?

As always ping me on @benyoungnz Twitter with any thoughts.