Overview

This section reviews the GroundWork Monitor Dashboards application.

1.0 About Dashboards

This section reviews the portal applications Dashboards for shared system dashboards, and My GroundWork for personal user dashboards.

1.1 Dashboards

Dashboards display real-time and dynamically updated monitoring status providing system users with quick answers to questions about overall network health, alerts regarding issues or problems, and information to help make decisions that impact the business. Dashboards incorporate critical data from available portlet instances and display this information on a web page with drill-down capability to specific host and service information.

The Dashboards page displays shared system dashboards view-able by all system users based on their membership attributes. These shared dashboards include; Summary, Trouble View, Monitoring, System View, Enterprise View, Virtualization View, and Hit List. Shared dashboards can be edited or created by a portal administrator (e.g. root/root). Administrators can allow access to a particular subset or individual pages or sub-pages of the monitored infrastructure to specific users. There are seven default GroundWork Monitor shared dashboards, see [How to view shared dashboards].

GroundWork Monitor 7.2.0 and beyond includes a new feature, GrafBridge. GrafBridge is an integration of several open source components allowing users to take advantage of the advanced features of Grafana, along with other capable packages we have added to enhance the collection and storage of performance metrics, the graphing of these metrics, and their presentation in dashboards. See About GrafBridge.

GroundWork Monitor 7.1.1 and above includes a new shared dashboard/portlet application called Hit List. The Hit List dashboard provides an at-a-glance and up-to-date view of all unresolved issues, both acknowledged and unacknowledged, from all monitoring sources. Systems upgraded from 7.1.0 to 7.1.1 see Appendix A: Adding Hit List Dashboard. This same procedure needs to be used for new installations to be able to access the Hit List portlet when creating new dashboards and pages.

1.2 My GroundWork

The _My GroundWork_ page enables users to create dashboards with quick accessibility to gadgets and personal views of monitoring information that are private to each user account. Personal dashboards are viewed and managed using the _My GroundWork_ link in the toolbar. The _My GroundWork Editor_ link is where you can choose to add or edit a personal dashboard.

2.0 About Users and Roles

Personal dashboards are configured and view-able by the username the dashboard was created by. For example, if you login with the username user and create a dashboard only the username user can view the dashboards created.

When configuring both personal and shared dashboards, it is important to remember that roles and memberships are associated with user accounts and these can limit the accessibility of specific portal pages and portlet instances. For example, the logged in username user is associated with the role /GWUser which does not include permissions to access the portal page Event Console. And for dashboards this also applies to specific portlet instances, for example, all Event Console portlet instances will be unavailable to users associated with the GWUser role. Additionally, the Actions portlet, used to execute commands in several portal pages, is limited by default to the memberships gw-monitoring-administrator (e.g., admin), and gw-monitoring-operator (e.g., operator). See About System Administration.

3.0 Dashboard Portlets

GroundWork Monitor runs under the JBoss portal and many areas of the user interface is composed of portlets. Not all GroundWork portlets are available for use in dashboards since some of them depend on other portlet associations or configuration data in order to work. This list of portlets is controlled by the /usr/local/groundwork/config/mygroundwork.xml file. If you add portlets from an external source or those of your own design to the system you will need to add them to this file to make them visible.

To see a list of available portlets see GroundWork Portlets.

Figure: Example of portlets in the Enterprise View dashboard