Typical Daily Interactions

After the NetEye.Cloud Support staff has completed your system configuration and monitoring has begun, you will most likely use NetEye.Cloud when:

• You need to make a configuration change, like adding or removing hosts, services or contacts, in which case you’ll use the Support Portal

• You receive a notification, so you’ll want to quickly find out which host or service is down and begin remediation

• You want to proactively find problems before they happen by studying trends in Operations Analytics

NetEye.Cloud provides you with a number of tools to make these latter two tasks both more efficient and more effective.

Spotting Problems with the Problem View

The Problems View collects in a single place all problems of a particular type, to help you solve multiple cases with a triage approach. Within each view, each host and service shown links to its Details panel.

• Host Problems: This view shows a list of all hosts in the Down state. Each row shows the host’s name, state, time in down state, and the check result that lead to that state:

  

  Fig. 202 The Host Problems view

  The hosts are sorted by severity by default, but can also be sorted by current and last state change.

• Service Problems: This view is similar to the Host Problems view, but shows services and their more detailed states and check results. In addition to the sorting options for hosts, services can also be sorted by the host they run on.

• Service Grid: This view displays a matrix representation with hosts on one side and services on the other. By default, it lists all hosts with at least one impacted service, and all services on a host with at least one impacted service. The boxes in the grid are color coded for state, everything is linkable. The grid can be rotated using the box at the top left.

• Current Downtimes: Lists all hosts that are currently under preventative maintenance. Shows the amount of time remaining before the specified restoration date for the host, and who scheduled the downtime.

  

  Fig. 203 The Downtime Problems view

For each view type you can adjust the filters to select a subset of the monitored objects to be displayed.

Adding Comments to a Monitored Object

As you work with hosts and services, you may want to annotate them with short comments, which will remain visible every time you view the host or service again, and which you can delete later when they’re no longer relevant.

Some types of comments you may find helpful are:

• Reminders to yourself to do something the next time you see this monitored object

• Creating a record when a problem repeats, to help you diagnose it later

• Messages to fellow sysadmins about plans for specific hosts or services

• Notes describing thoughts hard to capture in numbers, like relative importance

You can add comments directly from a monitored object view as shown here:

Fig. 204 Adding a comment directly to a monitored object

Note

The NetEye.Cloud Support team can also add or delete comments in bulk for you using filterable conditions with the Icinga 2 add-comment API action.

Once added, a comment can be viewed by going to the details panel for that host. To see all comments and be able to filter them according to your own criteria, go to dedicated view at Overview > Comments. Comments remain until deleted.

Acknowledging an Alert

When you’ve received a notification, you may want to quickly let others know that you’re aware of the alerted incident and are working on a fix. You can explicitly do this for a monitored object with an acknowledgement, which will send a notification message to other users or admins.

By default an acknowledgement will be removed if the host/service recovers (OK/Up) or a state change occurs. To keep an acknowledgement there until an issue moves from partially recovered to completely recovered, you can use the sticky parameter.

Like comments, the NetEye.Cloud Support team can also add or delete comments in bulk for you using filterable conditions with the Icinga 2 acknowledge-problem command.

Investigating Past Monitoring Events

If you haven’t arrived at NetEye because of a notification (for instance you do a daily morning check) the first step is almost always to look at the Dashboard to see if anything important is going on.

But suppose you’ve just come back from a day or two off and you want to see what’s happened in that time. The History section contains views that show you what important events have occurred, with a customizable filter:

• Event Overview: All the state transitions of monitored objects, showing the new state type, when it occurred, and the object affected

  

  Fig. 205 Viewing the Event Overview in History

• Notifications: All the notifications that were sent in a given time range, beginning with the most recent

  

  Fig. 206 Viewing the Notification log in History

Investigating More Deeply

When NetEye receives the results of performance-based monitoring checks, it stores them in a database in order to display that historical data for your hosts and services.

Over extended periods of time, or for the results of very frequent checks, it’s not enough to see just the raw data in text form that’s then displayed by Icinga 2. Similarly, the graphs displayed in the Host and Service Details panels is in graph form, which is very helpful to quickly see simple patterns in recent data.

IT Operations Analytics on the other hand is like a set of supercharged graphs: it allows for interactivity in multiple ways, such as in setting the time range of what’s visible, choosing a subset of data streams that are visible at any given moment, and computing functions involving one or more data streams.

NetEye uses Grafana to store and display interactive graphs using time-series data, with highly customizable features that can be either added from pre-existing dashboard templates, or that you yourself can create using Grafana’s built-in graphing language.

Fig. 207 An interactive ITOA graph showing time-series data