Monitoring: Know Your Audience - Opsview · Monitoring data, like all operations data, is at its most valuable when it leverages a presentation layer that puts the information in

Monitoring: Know Your AudienceBest Practice for Opsview Business Service Monitoring and Keywords

Opsview Technical Overview

Monitoring: Know Your Audience

ContentsSummary................................................................................................................................3

Modeling Your Business in Opsview........................................................................................4

BSM Components...................................................................................................................4

Keywords................................................................................................................................5

BSM Services..........................................................................................................................7

Suitable Visibility for Separate Target Audiences..................................................................8

Dashboards............................................................................................................................8

Notifi cations.........................................................................................................................10

Reporting..............................................................................................................................10

Conclusion.............................................................................................................................12

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Summary

Monitoring data, like all operations data, is at its most valuable when it leverages a presentation layer that puts the

information in the proper context for any audience. When QoS values like uptime and throughput make up strict

SLA requirements it becomes essential to make sure that the correct metrics and status information goes to the

right audience.

Complex IT environments leverage the concept of redundancy as a way of creating resilience and of improving

overall performance. While high availability, disaster recovery, and load balancing clusters provide invaluable peace

of mind for stakeholders, it manages to signifi cantly complicate SLA reporting at the same time. How can this

qualitative peace of mind be translated into a quantitative and reportable SLA value?

At the same time, it is important to make sure that isolated outages are still resolved before they can propagate

into a true loss of service. The more effi ciently that isolated outages can be prioritized and resolved, the better the

overall SLA report will be in the end. It is, therefore, important to stay ahead of isolated outages in order to ensure

SLA requirements for redundant and resilient IT off erings.

It is worth pointing out that these two levels of granularity are valuable to two completely separate target

audiences. Real life, end user availability is valuable for service consumers such as customers, executive

stakeholders, or compliance departments. SLA reporting against individual IT services running on hosts is best

utilized by administrators and team leads. This is the primary focus of this white paper; that building business

rules into a monitoring solution and properly reporting to application consumers and application administrators

appropriately can improve visibility and communication between the two parties and contribute to the overall

success of the business.

This guide will go over the use cases for the Opsview BSM feature and for Opsview Keywords and will demonstrate

how to get the most out of both features. It will cover the creation of BSM components and matching keywords

to be used as a means of drilling into the component for extra information. It will then cover some eff ective

dashboard confi gurations, notifi cation rules, and reporting practices.

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Modeling Your Business in Opsview

The presentation layer is a vital element to any business intelligence platform. Without being able to decode

the underlying data to the business terms that they represent, the information would provide little benefi t to

anyone. Therefore, like any other business intelligence tool, Opsview must provide a presentation layer so that

real architecture rules can be modeled in the tool providing accurate end user availability information. By being

thorough and doing this correctly, risk can be identifi ed and resolved before problems eff ect the service consumer

rather than allowing a costly outage to happen and tracing the failure back to a root cause.

It is a way to simplify the complicated architecture rules to the application by approaching it in pieces. The way

that a component is defi ned starts with the Opsview Host Template feature. This is the same feature that allowed

service checks to be applied to hosts in bulk by function. It is similarly able to group the check results by the

function. This will serve as the starting point for creating any component.

Selecting the desired Host Template fi lters the host selection box to only display hosts that are currently using that

template. These are all hosts that are being monitored in the same way because functionally they are all nearly the

same. It is then the job of the Opsview administrator to determine which of these common hosts are contributing

to a shared goal like a cluster of Solaris servers would be. This supports an arbitrary number of hosts to be grouped

together with an operational zone applied to the newly created BSM Component. This Operational Zone indicates




BSM Components

The fi rst essential things to defi ne in

Opsview are all BSM Components. BSM

components are a functional grouping

of hosts and services together with an

operating region used to determine the

overall health and priority of the grouping.

These are commonly used to defi ne

clusters, farms or failovers.




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the total percentage of the component that needs to be healthy for the entire component to be considered

eff ective. This now means that small failures within a cluster are fl agged as a potential impact to service rather

than immediately being marked as a failure.

Keywords

Before BSM Components, keywords were the only way to group together services to evaluate the impact of a critical

event. The fi gure below shows the process for creating a complementary keyword to the BSM component that was

made in the previous step. It is best practice to create these complementary keyword/component pairs for every

reportable component. The reason for this will become clearer in later stages of this exercise

For a BSM component complement, it is best to make a Keyword with the same name as the component that is

grouped by service. This way each of the functions the cluster needs to provide are accounted for and can be broken

down by each node.

Confi guring this complementary keyword to refl ect the same hosts and services as the component is a manual

process. The hosts are selected fi rst. These are the same hosts selected to create the component. Next there is a

check box to “Filter by selected hosts” so that choosing the correct service checks is less daunting. By selecting the

same checks that would be included in the host template, Opsview will now have a grouping that is eff ectively the

component minus the resiliency rules.

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BSM Services

The next step is to model the consumable service. Examples of these consumables could include VoIP phone

systems, email, the company website, collaboration portals, and other various applications. The status of these

consumables are of particular interest to anyone who is looking from the outside in. The list of those interested

could include customers, executive stakeholders, compliance departments, and auditors. In order to provide an

accurate status of these consumables they must fi rst be properly modelled within the monitoring software. By

understanding the anatomy of the application, website, or workfl ow and representing its uptime needs properly it

is possible to foster a culture that concentrates on proactive troubleshooting rather than fi ghting fi res. This may

appear to be an intimidating task but the diffi cult part has already been accomplished. These consumable business

services are simply a grouping together of BSM components which already have been assigned priority and itemized

SLA requirements when the operational zone was defi ned.

When creating a BSM service, there will be a section named the “Components Drawer”. This can be fi ltered with

the text box adjacent to it to make components easier to fi nd. To create a BSM service, simply click and drag

components from the drawer into the BSM service.




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Suitable Visibility for Separate Target Audiences

Monitoring is a three phase eff ort: data collection, presentation, and response. Now that Opsview has been

confi gured to model consumable business services, both in BSM and keywords, it is time to move on to the second

and third phases of the project. First, real-time presentation views will be created, then notifi cations rules will be

put in place keywords, BSM components, and BSM services according to the recipient and fi nally historical reporting

will be defi ned for both administrators and for external audiences alike.

Dashboards

Dashboards should be valuable both for tactical and strategic audiences. High-level views are often the most

important things for customers or executives to see. This view would have very little detail and will rarely use

keywords, if at all. One of the most powerful tools at your disposal for executive dashboards is the fi ltering feature

on the BSM Summary dashlet. By placing a BSM Summary dashlet and confi guring the settings correctly it is

possible to view a subset of services that may be of importance to you and it is also possible to fi lter by status. By

unchecking the “Operational” box, the widget is now set to be a traffi c light for application level statuses. If any

BSM services appear in the widget at all, it means that they are either in scheduled maintenance mode, impacted by

an underlying problem, or in a full failure. This is an ideal way to see IT operations at the highest levels possible.




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The next task is to create dashboards that show details about the BSM service or BSM component for application

owners or administrators respectively. A good practice for dashboarding is to create a user for the purpose of

holding shared dashboards for other contacts. For the purpose of displaying Business Service views, the contact

“BSM” with local authentication should be created. This user should have VIEWALL access, CONFIGUREBSM

access, and DASHBOARDEDIT access at a minimum.

In the dashboard tab for this user the following layout can be created per BSM to provide some detailed value for

the top level Business Service.

For larger environments with many applications and services it may be a good idea to create an additional contact

named “COMPONENTS” to hold component level dashboards to be shared with others. Dashboards for this contact

may look like the example below.




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Each of these contacts should share their dashboards with the roles that might fi nd value in them. This practice

now essentially provides saved dashboards that can be pulled up and deleted as needed by other Opsview contacts.

This saves dashboard space without having to recreate these views from scratch every time that they are needed.

The list of shared dashboards that are available should display BSM: <dashboard name> or Component: <dashboard

name> for each choice, making it easy to fi nd.

Notifi cations

With the addition of the BSM feature in Opsview it is now possible to set a notifi cation rule for BSM services or

components rather than the previous choices of host groups, service groups, and keywords. As with everything

else, the audience dictates the alerting requirements. BSM service notifi cations are ideal for application owners

and should then escalate to management levels. BSM component notifi cations are directed towards team leads

of various disciplines such as database, server, and network teams with an escalation to the appropriate architect.

This leaves the legacy host group, service group, and keyword based notifi cations for the front lines of monitoring

where every new issue should be investigated as quickly as possible.

Reporting

The ultimate goal of reporting as it relates to monitoring is to tell a story that is both accurate and puts IT

operations in a positive light. Accuracy can actually be fl attering when it comes to SLAs in such complicated

architectures. High availability, load balancing, site failovers, and other architecture concepts are implemented

because they make for a more stable environment. This means that reporting on SLAs as it relates to a BSM service

is going to be a real depiction of end user availability. Opsview now provides SLA reporting against the application

or business service so that this information can be sent to management or a customer.




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It is important, however, to make sure that this report will be telling a positive story at the end of the day, week,

month, or year. An ideal way to make sure that the fi nal, often automated, report is going to satisfy the SLA

requirements is to stay in front of application outages by maintaining the components that make them up. To do

this, Daily Service Level Reports and Daily Performance Reports can be run against the keyword that was created to

complement the components that make up the BSM service.




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These can be regularly scheduled to be sent to the appropriate administrators so that individual service checks

and host failures can be corrected before they exceed the component’s operational zone. By reporting both at the

BSM service level and at the component/keyword level, diff erent audiences can be provided the correct level of

granularity for their individual needs.

Conclusion

Monitoring is made up of three factors: data collection, presentation, and action. In order to use this information

for high value business intelligence reasons it is important to always keep in mind, “Who is my audience?”

Monitoring data can be used for an immediate response by an administrator that specializes in networks,

servers, or hardware as appropriate. This same data can be rolled up for team leads, architects, and application

owners. Finally, at the highest level, transparency should be provided for executive stakeholders and the

expected consumers of these applications and business services. This way risks can be identifi ed at every stage

and prevented instead of root causes being determined after outages occur. This promotes a culture of better

communication and better relationships between Information Technology and other business units in the

organization leading to better overall operations.




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Monitoring: Know Your Audience - Opsview · Monitoring data, like all operations data, is at its most valuable when it leverages a presentation layer that puts the information in