Use of Visio Services as a monitoring dashboard

Recently I read a case study where data driven Visio diagrams were used for monitoring some data centers using System Center Operations Manager. Visio 2010 Add-In for System Center Operations Manager was used for this purpose. Briefly, this add-in generates visio diagram which are fuelled by data from Operations Manager and these helps to monitor the entire Data Center or an enterprise network.

In the BI development lifecycle, typically we have ETL cycles loading data from OLTP to Relational data warehouse. And then we process the cubes and/or partitions. This lifecycle is not automated mostly in the development phase and in the production phase this is made automated on schedules. I feel that by using some house-keeping config tables that host data about the statistics of such cycles, and using a data-driven visio diagram powered by this data, one can easily create a monitoring dashboard.

Now if this diagram is shared in Sharepoint 2010, one can use Visio Services which would allow to view this diagram in a browser without requiring visio client installation. So without opening up the security of the servers, one can easily monitor these lifecycles over the web, making it possible to remotely monitor these schedules in an intelligent manner. This would save the effort of bringing PPS into picture for such internal house-keeping task or checking your Pager / Inbox for alerts / informational emails which can get either too concise or too verbose.