My Oracle Support

We've created this blog as a way to facilitate discussion about the CSM v2 Alpha release -- as we roll out functionality, we'll be creating new posts.  Please jump on in and add your comments, thoughts, and feedback -- if you have a good idea, let us (and the rest of the Alpha community) know!  And if you think someone else's idea is almost but not quite right, you can add a comment to give your own ideas. 

We're excited to collaborate with you to make this the best tool it can be!

As you can see, the new interface is "version 2" for a reason; it's got a significantly differently look and feel from the original CSM you're used to inside MetaLink.  We're using Flash technology to make things much more interactive and customizable, not to mention more responsive to individual customers' desires.
 
The three tabs in the top left corner -- Dashboard, Reports, and Collector -- are all live and displaying your information through our new framework.  The other links along the top will pop a window out to the appropriate pages from the existing MetaLink system -- we'd love to get feedback on which items you'd like to have presented through the new interface, what the priorities are, etc.
 
This new framework gives us a lot of power that isn't available in CSM v1.  For instance, we can create our own context-sensitive right-click menus, depending on which region you're in, which configuration you're viewing, that sort of thing.  We're only partially taking advantage of that particular ability thus far, so any thoughts as to the best way to make it useful are welcome.
 
Stay tuned for the rollout of more exciting features that make the interface even better and easier to use!

The region you see in the top left corner of your dashboard dispays the overall health of your systems.  There's a couple of hundred health checks that we've developed that are run against your configurations, and the front-page view of the region shows your score: how many violations of those health checks have been found across your systems, and what severity they're at.  You can also show the overall health results by score, which is calculated based on the number of violations and the severity.  Drilling into the region shows you the details of the violations -- which checks were violated, which targets were in violation, etc.  And of course, it gives recommendations for remediating those problems.  
 
What do you think -- are we showing the right balance of summary information on the front dashboard page, in relation to the detail inside?  Are we giving the right details that you need to know about in order to be satisfied that you're doing the right think with regard to keeping your systems in tip-top health?

Because CSM v2 is going to be integrated with MetaLink, support for managing your service requests is front and center.  Unlike static, "web 1.0" style displays, we've made the display of SRs feel more like an application.  Try out sorting, searching, or resizing the columns to make wider contents fit better.

If you click on a service request to drill into it, you'll get the detailed view with all the information you're accustomed to; but again, you'll have a better looking (and hopefully more usable) interface to interact with it.  Tell us -- does this display actually improve on what you were used to, and if so, how?  Do you see ways that we could make it even better?

This being the Configuration Support Manager, obviously having access to your configurations is pretty important.  So we've devoted a good chunk of screen real estate to the region displaying the configurations from your environment. 

As you probably know, CSM integrates with the OCM (Oracle Configuration Manager) collector tool to automatically discover configuration settings and changes to those settings, and upload the details.  (By the way -- check out the "Collectors" top-level tab in the upper right corner to deploy the collector to new systems.)  These configuration items are summarized in the region on the main dashboard page.

If you select a particular configuration, you'll notice that the screen you get looks a lot like the main dashboard: in fact, you're getting a dashboard with information specific to this configuration.  So now you have a view with SRs, system health, patch advice, etc. that relates just to this configuration as opposed to the system-wide view.  One of the common pieces of feedback that we've accumulated over time is that dashboard views are good, so we've tried to give you easy access to different kinds!