Overview
The Gateway is the 'core' of a Geneos installation. It sits between the two other major Geneos components - Netprobes and Active Console.
Gateways provide configuration for, and gather data asynchronously from, the various Netprobes installed on the machines you want to monitor across your estate. For more information about Netprobes, see the .
Gateways can be connected to multiple Active Consoles, the GUI that provides you with a control and monitoring interface for your Gateways. See Active Console Documentation Home for more information about Active Console.
For information on how to install a Gateway, see Gateway Installation Guide.
Key Gateway concepts
Setup files
A Gateway acquires it's configuration from Gateway setup files. A Gateway setup file is an XML file, and a full XML schema is supplied with the Gateway to define the format. Multiple Gateway setup files can be combined together to form the setup for one Gateway. This enables portions of the setup file to be stored externally and reused by multiple Gateways, which eases system administration and maintenance within your organisation. See Gateway Setup Files for more information.
The easiest way to edit the setup of a Gateway is to use the Gateway Setup Editor (GSE). The GSE is a standalone Java and C++ application bundled with, and accessible from, the Active Console. See Gateway Setup Editor and Active Console Documentation Home for more information.
Monitoring
Gateways configure and collect information from Netprobes. Netprobes are the agents responsible for collecting monitored metric from a target computer. Netprobes run plug-ins.
A plug-in is a component of Geneos that is tailored to provide specific management or monitoring capability. Plug-ins are configured in the Gateway Setup Editor, and a plug-in and its associated configuration (such as what intervals it gathers a sample) is called a Sampler.
Samplers provide Dataviews, which are table-like windows that present you with the monitored data.
Logging
The Gateway writes all of its log messages to a log file, allowing quick access the past Gateway behaviour. These log messages include descriptions of what the Gateway is doing as well as errors that may have occurred. ITRS support may ask you to send your Gateway log file when diagnosing problems.
See Gateway Log File.
Advanced features
Gateways are configured by the setup file to perform tasks such as run rules, fire actions, run commands, and log data to databases.
Gateways can be configured with various other advanced features, user authentication, and can share data to other Gateways. These allow you great customisation over your setup.
See below for the descriptions of the features of the Gateway.
Feature description
Directory Configuration
The monitoring configuration of the Gateway is known as the Directory Configuration. This configuration describes all the Netprobes which the Gateway connects to, and the Managed Entities and Samplers these probes host.
Actions
An action is a user-defined processing action that is fired in response to events. Rules are used to trigger actions in response to monitored events. Actions can be configured to trigger an internal process in Gateway, or an external system such as sending an email or raising a support ticket.
See Actions.
Effects
An effect is a user-defined processing effect, similar to a cut-down action. Effects can be called by Actions or by Alerts.
See Effects.
Annotations
The Annotations feature works with Alerting and Actions and allows users to target name / value pairs that are available to Actions and Alerts specific to the data items on which they were triggered.
For example, if you have some rules that trigger emails, annotations can be configured that are available only on specific cells or have different values depending on the target of the rule.
See Annotations.
Commands
Gateway commands are the primary method of interaction between a Gateway and connected users. Commands are invoked by users through a controlling process (such as Active Console) which prompts the Gateway to perform a given operation.
There are a number of pre-defined commands that are provided out of the box. In addition, Geneos administrators can define their own commands to provide a rich functionality set. Multiple commands can be chained together to create tasks, which enable administrators to define and automate more complicated procedures. Execution of commands can be restricted by the user permissioning system.
See Gateway Commands.
Scheduled Commands
Gateway allows the scheduling of any command in the system, including both internally-defined commands and user-defined commands. These commands can be scheduled to run automatically at recurring intervals, or one-off events at a specified time without further user input.
Scheduled commands are configured to run against a list of targets. This allows, for example, a command to be configured to run against every Netprobe in the system or some subset of those Netprobes.
See Scheduled Commands.
Rules
Rules allow run-time information to be updated and actions to be fired in response to specific Gateway events.
Typically, updates apply to the severity of cells, reflected in the Active Console by red, amber, and green cell backgrounds.
See Rules.
Alerts
Alerts allows users to be alerted of an item's severity based on the properties of the item, separating the configuration of alerts and alert recipients from the configuration of rules. For example, this can be used to send alert emails to different recipients based on the location of the server where the error occurred.
See Alerting.
Active Times
Active Times provide time-based control of Gateway features, allowing configured functions to be enabled and disabled based on user-defined time periods.
Once an active time has been specified in the Gateway setup, it is then referred to by name in the configuration of other Gateway features such as Rules, Actions, and Database Logging.
Active times are useful for restricting Geneos functionality to periods of time that are important. For example, to restrict the Gateway to only send alerts during "Trading Hours".
See Active Times.
Hot Standby
As the Gateway is responsible for consolidating all monitoring data for distribution to Active Console and other visualisation components, this introduces a single point of failure. To alleviate the problem, two Gateways can be run as a hot standby pair, so that if one Gateway fails the other gateway remains in operation until the fault is rectified.
See Hot Standby.
Database Logging
Gateway supports logging of data values or events to a database. These records allow users to perform historical search or analysis of monitored data, which can then be used to improve system reliability and performance.
Gateway currently supports the following databases for logging values to:
- MySQL or MariaDB
- Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE)
- Oracle 10g
- MS SQL Server.
See Database Logging.
Ticker event logging
Ticker events are produced by the Gateway when infrequent but important events occur. For example, Netprobe or Database disconnection events create an event, which is then viewable in the Active Console event ticker.
See Ticker Event Logger.
Authentication
When using the template setup file, users are allowed full access to all Gateway features for ease of configuration. User access to various functions within the Gateway can be restricted by the use of user definitions and permissions. In addition, user administration and permissioning can be simplified by the creation of user groups.
Various methods of user authentication are provided by the Gateway.
Environments
In many places in the setup file, you can either enter data directly or use a variable. The use of variables allows values to be substituted at key points. This promotes setup reuse by allowing widely used generic setup sections to be defined which can then be used by providing the specific parameter values. This can greatly ease setup administration for Geneos installations.
Auditing
The auditing feature of the Gateway allows logging of user interactions with the Gateway. These logs allow historical tracking of gateway functions and can be used to reconstruct a sequence of events or for security planning.
See Auditing.
Knowledge Base
The knowledge base feature allows Gateway to publish URL links to an organisation knowledge base or document repository, so that the links are available to Active Console users when viewing particular parts of monitoring data.
For example, this can be used to display who to contact if a particular system goes down, or common problems experienced by a process and how to resolve them.
See Knowledge base.
Persistence
Persistence is used in conjunction with compute engine and historical data. It allows historical values of monitored items to be persisted locally on the Gateway machine (instead of or in addition to database logging) on disk. This ensures that if the Gateway is restarted for some reason, values for historical calculations are immediately available to perform computations.
See Persistence.
Static variables
Static variables section of the Gateway setup defines a number of static variables.
The main use of static variables is to allow a common set of configuration options to be referenced by samplers. These settings are available in a single place and can be easily updated, rather than having to alter the configuration of a number of samplers manually.
See Static Variables.
Express reports
Express Reports allow you to define a set of predefined reports that can be generated and viewed.
See the Express Reports Server.
Restricted Sections
The restrictedSections section allows the user to define which other sections can be used in this setup file. It allows an include file to be limited to prescribed functions.
See Restricted Sections.
Self announcing probes
A Self-Announcing Netprobe (SAN) is a Netprobe that is configured to make a connection to a Gateway that has no prior knowledge of the SAN, and provide minimal information to allow monitoring to begin.
Gateways are configured to handle the connection.
See Self-Announcing Netprobes Technical Reference.
Gateway Sharing
The Gateway Sharing feature of Gateway allows users to share data between Gateways. This allows one Gateway to run rules and thus fire actions and alerts based on the combination of a subset of data from a set of Gateways.
Gateway Operating Environment
The Operating Environment is a configuration section where settings that affect the whole Gateway are set.
Gateway Hub
The Gateway can be configured to publish data from Geneos to Gateway Hub.
See Connecting to .