The new offering is being announced at HP's Software Universe in Nice, France, along with a new version of OpenView Business Process Insight and other tool revisions. The dashboard, priced from $60,000, will start shipping in the next quarter, HP said.

Bill Emmett, manager of OpenView Advocacy at HP, said the product allows IT managers to create views of systems based on a variety of criteria within a matter of minutes instead of days or weeks.

A major financial services firm based in the U.S. has been using a prerelease version of the dashboard for a pilot project over the past two months, said the company's vice president of architecture and engineering, who asked not to be identified. The project will be fully deployed next year, he said.

The dashboard has been flexible in providing information about systems used to support online trading, he said. "It's been quick and adaptive," he said, pointing to one case where a view of a process was revamped to reveal other information in only a day -- far less time than in the past.

"We support 70 different business units and deal with 30 of them daily, and not all 30 are going to want a plain vanilla dashboard view that I put out," he said.