foXpose and the NOC

What do multiple Nagios status pages, network traffic graphs and RT incident queues have in common? They’re all tabs I have open throughout the day. Because any of them can change at anytime, watching them has been always been a PITA. I used to get around this with a custom kludge that drove IE through a set series of pages. On the upside it worked. On the downside the periodic flicker of page changes drove me nuts.

I’ve moved to a two monitor set up at home, while this allows me to work and watch a page at same time the requirement to view multiple pages is still an important, and awkward, one. Thanks to foXpose this is suddenly a lot easier.

foXpose creates a tab that contains a miniature view of every tab you have open (apart from itself) and shows them all in a single tab. The great thing about it is that if any of the “real pages” change then the miniature one also adjusts. So you can watch too many tabs at once in real time! A foXpose tab has become an almost permanent resident in my right hand monitor.

If you work on a single monitor then Tab Sidebar might be more useful, instead of a whole tab of tabs, it opens a sidebar with a compressed version of each tab in it. While still allowing you to web browse in the main window.