FINOS - Waltz

What is Waltz ?

Overview

In a nutshell Waltz allows you to visualize and define your organisation's technology landscape. Think of it like a structured Wiki for your architecture.

Crowd source your architecture

A core belief behind Waltz is that technology information should be accessible by everyone within your organisation. Furthermore employees are your best source of information about your technology landscape and should therefore be empowered to enhance and correct data.

Building blocks

Waltz blends information about your apps, capabilities, organisational units, people and more to build out a comprehensive set of views that allow you to focus on the details or zoom out to see the big picture.

Your model

Waltz is domain agnostic. Define the models and structures that make sense for your organisation.

Features

See your applications

Waltz presents data about your application. Applications can be linked to capabilities, organisational units, people, servers, data types and more. Once linked, the data is displayed and relationships can be navigated.

Information in Waltz can be augmented manually to increase the value, comprehensiveness and accuracy of your application views.

Aggregate Views

Once applications have been linked to entities (such as organisational units, people and capabilities) you can navigate through dynamic views which show aggregate summaries of related applications etc.

See how an application is connected

How an application is connected to other applications in your organisation is a central part of Waltz. We can describe upstream and downstream applications along with the data types exchanged.

As this topology is created you may start to define authoritative sources for datatypes and see which applications are sourcing their data from approved golden sources.

See how your organisation is connected

Building upon an individual applications connections we can start to view how applications are connected when they are aggregated.

If authoritative sources have been defined a organisational-unit level scorecard is produced showing what proportion of your logical data flows are being sourced from strategic systems.

Statistics

Define your own sets of statistic definitions and then use Waltz to navigate though the collected values using the structural entities relevant to you.

Create and share custom groups

Waltz allows you to create custom, ad-hoc groups of applications. This feature is often used to quickly understand a subset of your application portfolio. For instance you may wish to create a group containing SOX relevant applications.

Demo

We have a demonstration website available. Please note that sample data is currently being created so not all features are demonstrated.

How Waltz fits into the EA Tooling landscape

Waltz is designed to complement existing architecture-related solutions in your organisation (such as PowerDesigner, Archimate, Sparx or other Enterprise Architecture tools); it complements these solutions and enables integration with them as the need arises. Waltz is not intended to be a golden source of data other than for data attributes derived uniquely in the tool (e.g. ‘Estate Complexity’ score).

As a general principle, Waltz presents read-only information about the organisation by aggregating data from numerous backend systems. Where information is not readily available Waltz does provide basic edit capabilities to facilitate data capture.

Technical Details

Client Side

Waltz is accessed via a web browser. Modern web browers are supported. We have explicitly tested on:

Chrome
Firefox
Safari
IE 11+

The application makes heavy use of AngularJS, lodash and D3 for interaction. Bootstrap and Fontawesome for look n' feel and is built using Webpack and SASS.

Security

Waltz has a pluggable security system and can authenticate users against a built in set of user profiles or integrate with external systems such as SSO. Contact us for more details.

One authenticated users can be granted discrete privileges within the application for authorization purposes. New uses can be granted a default set of permissions, we recommend using a generous set of defaults as Waltz works best when a diverse set of users contribute their knowledge.

Server Side

Waltz is built as a Java based web application. We currently deploy to (embedded) Jetty and to Apache Tomcat (8+) server. JDK 8 is required to build and run Waltz.

We recommend a 64 bit JVM running with a minimum of 1GB heap.

Under the covers Waltz uses Spark Framework to expose endpoints, Spring for dependency injection, JOOQ for database access and we use Immutables for representing the domain object layer.

Database

Waltz is being built to support MariaDB (currently supported), PostgreSQL (in progress) and Microsoft SQL Server (supported -however you will need to purchase a license for JOOQ to compile and build the system).