Overview

The Performance View application displays graphs of any and all performance data collected by the system. This application extremely flexible in its ability to combine multiple data sets across multiple hosts. In essence, any numerical data returned by any plugin in the system can be graphed in combination with any other like data. Any combination of performance graphs can be consolidated and saved as reports for repeated viewing with constant updated data.

1.0 About Performance View

GroundWork Monitor provides graphing and reporting for performance over time so you can watch trends in order to take early corrective action by making visual correlations across metrics from multiple services. It also helps in watching capacity trends for planning purposes. Performance View enables you to generate performance graphs from the monitoring data gathered (e.g. disk space usage, processor load, CPU utilization, Memory utilization, Bandwidth utilization, I/O Stats.etc.). It supports storage, analysis, and display of performance data-in both graphical and tabular formats.

The power of this interface to compare performance of systems and applications is obvious. For example, historical views of CPU vs memory utilization across several servers can be placed next to graphs of network utilization, allowing Administrators to quickly pinpoint problems.

GroundWork service profiles include the configuration information for the creating of performance graphs. If you are implementing a service profile from GroundWork Monitor follow the install instructions and the performance graph configuration will be included.

Performance View graphs are setup using the Configuration > Performance tool. Metric data from such sources will not be collected, and will not be available as graphs in the Status or Performance View applications, until you have set up an entry here which matches the service+host combination for the data source of interest.

The Performance View (default install) only gives access to metrics collected on the Parent Server, with the RRD graphs as the source.

2.0 Creating a Performance View

1. Select the Reports > Performance View > New.
2. In the Performance View screen, select a Host from the drop-down box, you will see corresponding data sets displayed, choose the data sets by using the Ctrl and Shift keys, and select Add Data Sets. The selected hosts and data sets will be displayed at the top of the screen. You can also choose to select a Data Set and corresponding Hosts.
3. Select a View Option:
   • Expanded - Displays separate graphs for each Host/Data Set added along with a graph for each different time period selected. For example, if you select 3 Host/Data Set views and specify a time period in Hours and one in Days you will receive 3 times 2, or 6 graphs.
   • Consolidated by host - Consolidates selected hosts into one graph per time period selected.
   • Consolidated - Consolidates all data into one graph per time period selected.
4. Select a time series for the graph, Hours, Days, and or a Date Range (each selection produces a graph). 
   
   Figure: Creating Performance Graphs
   
   
5. Select Graph Performance to display the graph. From this screen you can manually refresh the Nagios data by selecting Refresh or you can enter a number of seconds for the system to automatically refresh the data. To do this make sure the Auto Refresh box is checked.
   
   Figure: Viewing a Performance View graph
   
6. Select Configure to return to the selection criteria page.
7. Select Save View to initially save the Performance View, performance graphs are saved in the the performance_views sub directory as an .xml file:

   /usr/local/groundwork/core/performance/performance_views/view_1457130014.xml