Overview

The Overview app provides a customisable summary of the entities monitored by Obcerv.

This app allows a new user to immediately get a high-level overview of their estate and to expand into detailed metrics in areas of interest. This is useful when exploring your data and can help inform the configuration of the Dashboards app for more targeted monitoring.

To help you organise these metrics Obcerv provides dimension Hierarchy and Classification functionality.

Prerequisites

The following must be installed before installing the Overview App

• Web-Console
• Query Service

Lifecycle

Install

1. Create a chart config file, such as app.yaml with content similar to the following:

externalHostname: www.obcerv.local
ingress:
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: "nginx"
    nginx.org/mergeable-ingress-type: "minion"

• The externalHostname parameter must match the DNS name configured for the Web-Console.
• Your ingress controller may require custom annotations on the ingress (this example is for ingress-nginx).

2. Install the chart:

helm install -f app.yaml obcerv-app-system-overview itrs/obcerv-app-system-overview \
             --version 1.0.0.XX --devel -n itrs --wait

Uninstall

helm uninstall obcerv-app-system-overview -n itrs

Upgrade

To upgrade the App, first uninstall and then install it again using the new version.

Overview page

The Overview page in the Web Console is divided into three sections:

• Options header — allows you to define groups and filters to organise monitored entities.
• Entities section — shows Entity tiles sorted by groups. Each tile or table entry is coloured according to its severity.
• Metrics section — shows a tree view of the data associated with the selected entity. Metrics and attributes associated with the selected node in the tree view are shown on the right hand side.

Hierarchies

The Hierarchies page shows the rules that Obcerv uses to organise the hierarchy of entities and metrics. This is also the hierarchy used in the Overview > Metrics section.

Defining the hierarchy of entities is important for the following reasons:

• Propagating attributes down to the child entities.
• Propagating severity status up to the parent entity.

The dimensions of an entity have no inherent hierarchy so this must be added by Obcerv. This occurs in the following ways:

• The platform contains preconfigured rules for many scenarios.
• The query service does automatic inference of hierarchies by looking at the global dimension key-space. Where it cannot infer a hierarchy from set-containment, a hierarchy is set based on alphabetical order.
• You can promote or modify inferred hierarchies from the Web Console.
• Only promoted or preconfigured hierarchies are used when propagating attributes and severities.

Promote an inferred hierarchy

1. Click EDIT to enter editing mode.
2. Click the promote button next to a dimension hierarchy.
3. Click SAVE.

You can also promote all current inferred hierarchies using the PROMOTE ALL button.

Re-order a hierarchy

1. Click EDIT to enter editing mode.
2. Click the Order button next to a dimension hierarchy.
3. Drag and drop dimensions to re-order the hierarchy.
4. Click CONFIRM, then click SAVE.

Classifications

Entities in Obcerv are identified by their unique set of dimensions. However, different data sources may use different conventions for assigning dimensions. This means that entities that are similar conceptually may have very different dimensions and be difficult to capture in one query.

Consider the following two entities as an example:

• Geneos data: [probe=CENTOS7-MLG5, managedEntity=CENTOS7-MLG5, type=All, sampler=Disk, dataview=Disk, row=/boot]
• Collection Agent plugin data: [hostname, device, volume]

Both entities represent disks, but have very different dimensions.

To resolve this problem you can create policies that assign special attributes to entities called classifications. You can then use classifications to easily create simple queries.

The Classifications page shows all current policies used to assign classification attributes.

Create a new classification policy

To create a new policy that assigns classifications:

1. Click EDIT to enter editing mode.
2. Click the Add rule button.
3. Specify an Attribute Name. This is the attribute that attached to all entities this policy effects.
4. Specify one or more policy rules. You must specify an Attribute Value and a pattern that defines Where each policy rule is applied. To do this use an Expression.
5. (optional) If you have set multiple policy rules you can order them using the arrow buttons.
6. Click OK, then click SAVE.

Edit a classification policy

To update an existing classification policy:

1. Click EDIT to enter editing mode.
2. Select the menu button of the policy you want to change, then click Edit.
3. Modify the Attribute Name.
4. Add or modify policy rules. If you have set multiple policy rules you can order them using the arrow buttons or delete them using the delete button.
5. Click OK, then click SAVE.