How to SLA dashboard management

Overview

This page reviews the SLA Dashboard Management feature, accessible under the Business option in GroundWork Monitor along with Business Service Monitoring (BSM) and SLA Management.

1.0 About Publish Status

The Publish Status tool enables GroundWork service information available outside of the GroundWork portal. This tool is installed with GroundWork Monitor 7.2.1 and above and is intended to help make available selected service status information for use in custom dashboard applications (e.g., NOC, departmental status page).

You can create data templates and associate them with exported data, allowing you to customize how the data from GroundWork gets displayed. The status is updated regularly on a configurable interval. It’s not real-time, but it’s never far behind.

2.0 View Clients

The first tab within the Publish Status tool, View Clients, allows you to create new clients or edit existing ones. A client in this context is simply a location where specific content can be accessed, along with a specification of what data to show, in what format, and with what template. All the clients you create are shown in this View Clients page.

Go to (1) Business > SLA Dashboard Management. Selecting (2) Publish Status displays the first of a series of tabs, View Clients which lists existing clients. (3) To make changes to a client click the corresponding edit icon (pencil). To permanently remove a client click the corresponding X icon.

Figure: View clients

3.0 Create Client

Selecting the Create Client tab displays the Client Information form. Each section is describe below.

3.1 Client Information

Under Create Client, you will find the Client Information form. The fields include (1) File, this is a name for the file that will hold the exported content. If you leave it blank, an MD5 sum will be generated and used. You may want something more descriptive, however. If so add it here, ensuring it is unique among such files. (2) Name is the HTML name of the content in the File. This is optional, but can be used to label the content. (3) The Description field can show text information in the HTML that is generated.

You can make the Name and Description appear or be hidden by adjusting the HTML template (see View Export Templates below). You can also adjust the relative position of the included fields.

In the following example, the Name field is set to Service Live Status, and first in the item order. The Description field is omitted from the template, so it is irrelevant what the content actually is in this case.

Figure: Name field


Figure: Create clients

3.2 Monitoring Settings

Under Monitoring Settings, you select the services to be published. Selecting a (1) host from the drop-down menu displays all services on that host in the (2) selection area.

If the selected service is added with the Add selected button, an (4) additional configuration field can be opened by clicking on the service in the (3) list on the right. The (5) Displayed name field can be used to customize the name of the service that is displayed in the external view.

In addition, the service name and host name are output per service. The (6) Additional information field can be used to display one text item per service, for example a maintenance note. This field, if supplied, generates an information button that shows this text when clicked. In the example here, the E-Mail service has data in Additional information.

Figure: E-Mail service additional data


Figure: Create client

3.3 Monitoring Options

In the Monitoring Options section, the export data format and location are specified.

Under (1) Export format you can choose one or more of the listed formats. Each format used requires its own (2) Export template. On this screen you can select only existing templates. See below to edit or create your own.

Use (3) Transfer method to choose between SSH, FTP and Local. If SSH is selected as the transfer method, the (4) Host, (5) Path, and User must be specified. An existing private and public key can be specified here. If the keys are omitted, the system automatically generates a new key pair with 2048 bits.

If FTP is selected, the Host, Path, User and Password must be specified. For Local, only the Path to where the files will be copied to the local file system needs to be specified.

(6) The new configuration can now be saved. The Publish Status cronjob now runs this client regularly (default is every 5 minutes) and transfers the data to the chosen location. The service status is thus regularly updated in the external location.

Figure: Monitoring options

4.0 View Export Templates

In the View Export Templates tab, you can see the list of all defined templates you have defined, which can be edited or deleted.

Figure: View export templates

5.0 Create Export Templates

In the Create Export Template tab, you can create your own templates for any and all export formats. In the (1) Name field, provide the template name. This is the name you will see when selecting the Export Template for a client under Monitoring Options.

Each template is specific to an export type. You can select the (2) Export type for a template.

In the (3) Description field you can enter text to describe the template. This information is not available in the exported view of the service content, it is to help you keep track of the templates use. The (4) Content field contains all the generated code that will be present in the exported file.

For the HTML export type, there are several placeholders described on the template editing screen which can be used in the template code. CSS and JS are allowed in the Content field. This allows the template to be integrated with a central CSS file, and the placeholders can be used to give the displayed data more context (such as the time stamp of the cronjob, the service description data, etc).

Figure: Create export templates