Overview

This section reviews the GroundWork Monitor Status application and the various integrated portlets.

1.0 About Status

With the Status interface, users have access to various critical views into their company's IT infrastructure including high level status of all servers, applications, networks, and services as they near or breach thresholds. The majority of the Status application relies on GroundWork-developed technology that extracts, normalizes and stores monitoring status data in a separate embedded database and makes the data available via an application programming interface (API). The interface itself is written using PHP, a widely used open source scripting language, resulting in much higher performance than is possible with the Nagios current interface built using Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts. Also, Status utilizes AJAX-based dynamic inter-activity which allows data updates to occur regularly without reloading the entire page.

Basically, Status has two main parts, the Tree View portlet on the left side (expandable to various levels), and various monitoring data portlets located on the right. Above the portlets are tabs can be used for easy access to previously viewed pages.

2.0 Status Layout

2.1 Tree View

The Tree View portlet provides the tabs; Hosts, Services, and Search.

The host and services tabs display lists of monitored host groups and service groups, and the search tab enables quick access to specified monitoring objects based on the entered host, service, alias, and IP address criteria. The listed host and service groups are expandable and each object is preceded by a color-coded status indicator, which is referred to as the bubble up feature, and indicates the most critical state of an underlying object.

2.2 Monitoring Data Portlets

When a specific component level is selected the corresponding monitoring data is displayed within portlets on the right side of the screen. These portlets display status information in various formats including summaries, charts, performance graphs, and events, and allows drilling-down to detailed data. You can apply and execute commands such as scheduling downtime or other actions. The specific portlets that are displayed and the actions that are available vary depending on the component that is selected. Additionally, when using the Search tab, the search results provide status indicators, mouse over summaries, and drill-down capability to go directly to that components monitoring data. Search results can also be sorted by Host, Host Group, Service, Service Group, and alphabetically.

In the example below, you can see that the host group Linux Servers, has a status indicator of Down:Unscheduled due to the bubbling up status information of underlying host(s). Along with the quick bubble up feature, the Tree View portlet offers quick mouse over object level information where you can mouse over an elements name to view its summary. In our example, we mouse over the host group Linux Servers to display the information, Alias: Linux Servers Summary, Hosts: 1, Troubled Hosts: 1, and Troubled Services: 1.

By default, Status displays hostname prefixes which identifies the application type and how the host was originally created. For example a host configured by Cacti will have a prefix CACTI, a host configured by Cloud Hub VMware will have VEMA as the prefix, and a host configured by Nagios will have the prefix NAGIOS. You may turn on/off prefixing for both hosts and services in the status properties file, see Configuring Status.

The Tree View enables various element levels including the Entire Network, Host Groups, Service Groups, Hosts and Services to be displayed.

Figure: Tree view portlet

3.0 Host and Service States

The table below summarizes the icons which represent host group/host, and service group/service states. Host icons are square and service are round. The parent node shows the most critical state, (e.g. a Host Group will be displayed as Down if any of the underlying Hosts are in a Down state).