[Also Known As: How to match colors for graphics in custom OpsMgr NOC dashboards using Microsoft Paint]
My son Gavin (known from previous blog posts including how to use a Kinect to drive Operations Manager) taught me a trick today while I was working on building an alpha version of a NOC dashboard for a client. For background, I have a process that I use for to develop these NOC views this which is available at: https://www.catapultsystems.com/cfuller/archive/2011/08/29/opsmgr-dashboard-integration-creating-company-specific-dashboards.aspx. What Gavin showed me today is how to use Microsoft paint to identify the RGB values for a color and then those can be added into Visio. As an example, if the following technology graphic is pasted into Microsoft Paint you can then use the eyedropper (highlighted below) to sample the color and add it as a custom color:
By clicking on edit colors, the RGB values for the color are identified (highlighted below).
In Visio a custom color can be used to to fill pieces of the dashboard as shown below:
The results are the following example of a graphic included in the NOC view which was built using the RGB colors values identified for a color. In the example below, the Production Applications box was added based on the color used from the original technology graphic shown below it.
This approach makes it really simple to use graphics from a variety of sources and create a dashboards which has a similar graphical look and feel of the customer’s existing website or documentation.
Special thanks to Gavin Fuller for pointing this trick out to me!