Overseeing Your Infrastructure

The Global Scan dashboard enables you to view the current status of all of the Elements (servers and devices, Applications, and SLAs) in your environment. When initially viewed, the Global Scan dashboard is displayed, and typically contains a list of all the Elements that are being monitored by up.time .The Elements table displays the following information:

• the status and number of services that are associated with the Element
• the number of recent service outages
• CPU usage
• hard disk usage
• memory usage

For convenience, you can sort the Elements table by any outage type.

Service status indicators range from normal (green), to Warning (yellow), to Critical (red), and also include an Unknown state (gray). An Unknown state indicates that no performance data for the last 10 minutes exists for the Element. To avoid false positives, note that recently added Elements will have this status until 10 minutes’ worth of performance data has been collected; also, in cases where the up.time Data Collector service is down for more than 10 minutes, all Elements will have this status until the service has been restarted and enough data has been collected.

The thresholds for the service status indicators are typically 70% for a warning state, and 90% for a critical state. These thresholds can be customized (see Changing Reporting Thresholds).

The Recent Incidents bar chart at the top left displays, in real-time, the number of service monitors that reported a non-OK status (CRIT, WARN, UNKNOWN, MAINT) during each of the past 24 hours. Note that host rechecks are included in the incident tally. 

The Current Service Status pie chart at the top right visualizes the current availability of systems or devices. The services for unmonitored systems in groups are not shown in the pie chart.

Viewing All SLAs

Service level agreements on the SLAs dashboard indicate whether performance targets are being met. Although the main summary displays the status of the SLA definition as a whole, you can also expand the view to verify how well component service level objectives (SLOs) are meeting targets. (SLOs are made up of monitored services that, as a group, are used to measure a specific performance goal.)

In the Service Level Agreements subpanel (accessed by clicking the SLAs tab), the following SLA information is provided in the default view:

• the list of SLAs, and whether any are in a critical or warning-level state
• headway into the time period during which compliance is measured
• the percentage of allowable downtime used, after which the SLA’s status becomes critical

Viewing All Applications

The Applications dashboard displays the status of all Applications that the currently logged in user is permitted to view. Applications are groups of service monitors that together represent the status of a greater business or IT function within your organization. They consist of any number of two types of monitors: 

• master service monitor: used to determine the status of the Application as a whole
• regular service monitor: does not affect Application status, but helps provide a complete picture by representing a secondary service, or a direct dependency of a master service

On the dashboard, the overall status of each Application is color coded:

• Applications functioning normally are marked with a check box icon ()
• Applications undergoing maintenance are marked with a scheduled maintenance icon ()
• Applications in a warning state are highlighted in yellow and marked with a warning icon
• Applications in a critical state are highlighted in red and marked with a critical icon

The number and status of an Application's service monitors are also displayed through a series of bars: green indicates the service is functioning normally; yellow means the service is in a warning state; and red indicates the service is in a critical state. This information can be displayed in a default Condensed View, or a Detailed View.

Viewing the Network Dashboard

The network dashboard is a summary of network device performance, and network-based service monitor outages. It is automatically updated every 30 seconds. You can view this dashboard by clicking the Network tab.

The network dashboard provides you with a single view of your network environment, and keeps you abreast of any network-related issues:

• instantly spot network capacity issues, and compare trends over the past day
• pinpoint top resource consumers to help resolve performance bottlenecks before they cause an outage
• immediately spot network devices that are currently failing, and click through to investigate the root cause

The following metrics are together used to report network performance:

For each category, there is a performance gauge that displays the average for all monitored ports based on the most recent sample. Maximum and minimum values over the last 24 hours is also shown. Note that the first two metrics are percentage-based, and their gauges are static; the remaining three metrics' gauges may scale if the recorded value exceeds the default upper limit. The thresholds for the service status indicators are typically 70% for a warning state, and 90% for a critical state.

Additionally for each category, there are top-10 lists displaying the individual Elements that are using the most bandwidth, have the highest latency, or seeing the most errors or discarded packets. Clicking any Element name will display its Quick Snapshot page, where you can further investigate bottlenecks.

Viewing All Services

Services are specific tasks, or sets of tasks, performed by an application in the up.time environment. up.time service monitors continually check the condition of services to ensure that they are providing the required functions to support your business. For more information on services, see Understanding Services.

You can view the services assigned to each system in your environment by clicking on the All Services tab. This tab contains the following information in sortable columns:

• the name of the service
• the Element that is associated with the service
• the status of the service
• whether an outage has been acknowledged
• the date and time on which the last check was performed
• the number of days, hours, and minutes since the last check
• a human-readable text message that was returned by the monitor (e.g., up.time agent running on MailServer, up.time agent 3.7.2 linux)

Viewing Scrutinizer Status

Scrutinizer is a NetFlow analyzer that takes advantage of communications standards for Cisco IOS networking devices and other compatible switches and routers to retrieve and store network traffic information for users, systems, and applications. It allows administrators to monitor, graph, and report on network usage patterns, and locate the heaviest traffic creators.

Scrutinizer can be integrated with up.time. Doing so allows you to access all of Scrutinizer’s features from the NetFlow dashboard:

Additionally, hardware monitored by Scrutinizer that has been added to up.time as a network-device-type Element will have a NetFlow link on its Graphing tab that transfers you to the Scrutinizer interface.