Documentation That Makes a Difference

At Hyperic, we're serious about information

We believe that documentation is an important and integral part of every product we ship. Our documentation team says, with a straight face, that HQ documentation is Hyperic's competitive advantage. Our goal is to have the best documentation in our space: we're not here to be second best.

Technical documentation is work worth doing, and worth doing well. Here's how we approach it, and a few examples of what it looks like:

• Start with first principles — Our position is that you can't make use of technical references until you understand our core functionality. A little bit of context goes a long way. That's why we provide the Hyperic HQ Product Tour.
  
  

• Give users the tools to figure stuff out — We do our best to give you the information you need to solve the basic problems you might encounter getting HQ up and running. After all, what we deliver is in fact software. No matter how good it is, HQ gets installed in a virtually infinite array of environments, and to make it work well, you need some basic facts. We think its good practice to provide unambiguous information about HQ's core behaviors:

  What happens when the product starts up? We tell you in "What Happens when an Agent Starts Up"

  How do the components get their configuration? We tell you in "Understanding Agent Configuration"

  How do the HQ components communicate with each other? We show you a picture in "Agent Server Communications Diagram"

• Be blindingly clear about defaults and options — Our learning and teaching philosophy is that there's a whole lot you can learn about a product by understanding its configuration options. There's an elegant truth to be ferreted out from properties files, deployment descriptors, and configuration files. So, we make it easy to find that information. These are the kind of facts that shouldn't be hidden like Easter eggs. That why we have configuration references like the Agent Properties Reference.

So, is it soup yet? Have we achieved documentation nirvana? No, and we never will, because there's always room for improvement, innovation, and finding even better ways to improve our users' experience with Hyperic products. We have a team of documentation professionals who wake up every morning with this task ahead of them; you'll be pleased with their work.