Web Montage - User Guide

Commands with User Prompt

Most commands will prompt a dialog that would require user inputs (e.g., selecting “Snooze -> Until Severity Change OR Time” will prompt a dialog with 5 parameters).

If there are no required user inputs, the command will be executed automatically without prompting the user.

Commands with Displayable Results

There are commands that will display results after executing (e.g., CPU plugin “Top 20 Processes”).

Commands History

All executed commands can be revisited and can re-display results using the Commands link on the upper right corner of the window.

Upon clicking the link, it will display a list of executed commands with properties such as command name, target entity, status, description, and date executed. By default, the items will be sorted based on the latest executed command.

Double click or right click on an item to view the results of an executed command.

Commands and Authorisation

The commands available through Open Access depend on Gateway level authorisation. On the Gateway side, it is possible to configure each Gateway user with fine-grained permissions on commands. If the Gateway user cannot see or execute the command, the Open Access cluster that connects using the same Gateway username cannot either.

On the Open Access side, it is currently not possible to configure each Open Access user with fine-grained permissions on commands made available by Gateway. As a result, all Open Access users will have the same permissions on commands. However, Open Access allows you to configure data level permissions to control which data is visible to its users.

Knowledge Base Links

To access Knowledge Base Links, select the data cell that contains Knowledge Base on Dataview and Metrics View gadgets, or in the Investigate page. These cells are marked with the Knowledge Base icon. Upon clicking the target link, a new tab or window will pop up and load the associated URL link.

Dataview

The Dataview gadget provides real-time visualisation of a standard Geneos dataview: table and headline values, severities, snooze state, inactive state, and if a user has been assigned to a cell.

The contents of the data tables are specific to the Netprobe plug-in that is the data source.

• Quick Search: Available using the Quick Search field that can be found on the upper right corner of the gadget. By default, the quick search will filter based on data in any column. If you want to search on a specific column, do a right click on the Quick Search field and select the target column to search against.
• Copy Data: To copy a single row, select the row and press “CTRL+C”. A comma delimited value of the row data will be copied to the clipboard. Use CTRL or SHIFT key to select multiple rows within the dataview gadget. The order of data displayed in the copied output will depend on the order of the data selected.

Configuration Options:

• Title - The string displayed in the title of the gadget.
• Path - A Geneos XPath used to locate the dataview to display. This path must resolve to ‘dataview’. Should the path resolve to more than one dataview, the system will combine the dataviews.

An error icon (with an error message on mouse-over) will be displayed if an invalid path or path that is included in the Open Access blacklist is entered. No error, however, will be shown for misspelled or non-existent entities.

Metrics View

The Metrics View gadget visualises one or more Geneos dataviews in a single gadget. The dataview will visualise table and headline values, severities, snooze state, inactive state, and if a user has been assigned to a cell. The dataview will update in real time.

This gadget consists of two sections; a state tree style selector for choosing the dataview to focus on (left side), and the display when clicking on the dataview (right side).

The contents of the dataview tables are specific to the Netprobe plug-in that is the data source.

Configuration Options:

• Title - The string displayed in the title of the gadget.
• Path - A Geneos XPath used to locate the dataview to display. This gadget will visualise all Dataviews that can be found under the specified paths. For example, if a path to a managed entity is supplied, all Dataviews existing under that managed entity will be displayed.

List View

The List View gadget visualises a set of dataitems returned from an XPath query, but is currently non-interactive The gadget will display an appropriate icon for each dataitem that matches the path. The icons reflect severity and snooze state, and update in real time.

This gadget can display a context menu that allows opening a managed entity in a parameterised montage. The menu can be opened by clicking and holding the mouse on a managed entity icon.

Configuration Options:

• Title - The string displayed in the title of the gadget.
• Path - A Geneos XPath used to query for dataitems to visualise. This path should evaluate to one or more dataitems.

An error icon (with an error message on mouse-over) will be displayed if an invalid path or path that is included in the Open Access blacklist is entered. No error, however, will be shown for misspelled or non-existent entities.

State Tree

The State Tree gadget provides a tree representation of Geneos dataitems, allowing users to drill down by severity. This gadget is similar to the the navigation tree in the Investigate page.

It is an interactive gadget, and users can expand or collapse sections of the tree to reveal or hide data. The icons’ colors reflect the severity of the underlying nodes.

When added to a parameterised montage, the gadget becomes a “driver” gadget. After selecting a node in the tree, all other gadgets on the Montage page will use the node’s path as a parameter. For other gadgets on the page to use this path, they need to have ”.” in the beginning of their path configuration (e.g., .//dataview).

Configuration Options:

• Title - The string displayed in the title of the gadget.
• Path - A Geneos XPath used to determine the set of data to display. The path should resolve to a set of directories, probes, managed entities, samplers or dataview dataitems. The gadget will visualise the appropriate level of drill down.
• Entity Attributes - A comma separated list of attributes used to order the logical view of the data. By default, the physical view of the data is displayed.

Treemap

The Treemap gadget shows nested managed entity attribute folders similar to the logical view in State Tree. It is an interactive gadget where users can drill up and down the folder hierarchy until the managed entity level.

The tiles’ colors reflect the severity of the underlying nodes, and a blue border around a tile indicates snoozed status. The name of an entity/folder is displayed on the tile if the width of the text is smaller than the width of the tile. When no text is displayed, the name of the managed entity is shown in a tooltip.

Drill down is performed by clicking on a rectangle, and drill up (or going back) is performed by clicking on the breadcrumb link at the top of the gadget. A click on a managed entity will show a context menu that lets users navigate to other montage pages or the Investigate page.

Configuration Options:

• Title - The string displayed in the title of the gadget.

• Path - A Geneos XPath used to determine the set of data to display. The path should resolve to a set of managed entities or dataview dataitems. The gadget will visualise the appropriate level of drill down. When the path resolves to a set of dataviews (e.g. //dataview), the gadget will show the Critical and Warning dataview count on each folder/entity.

• Entity Attributes - A comma separated list of attributes used to order the logical view of the data.

• Severity Style - Select how severity color is visualised in a treemap. Multiple boxes can be ticked to apply a combination of styles.

  • Text = Color of the text changes to reflect the severity. This is the default behavior.
  • Outline = Outline of the box changes color to reflect the severity. Note that snoozed items will always have an outline, even if this setting is not checked.
  • Fill = Box fill color changes to reflect the severity.

Line Chart

The Line Chart gadget provides a graphical line chart representation of Geneos data, plotting multiple data series on the y-axis against time on the x-axis. The charts are interactive with a zoom feature to scroll back through historic data and selectable data series which add and remove lines from the chart. It is possible to zoom in on an area of the chart by clicking and dragging the mouse.

• Data Caching: When one user specifies a path that resolves to another series, data for this series will be cached on the server. This means if several users are subscribed to the same data series, the server only maintains one set of data for all of them with little strain on its resources.
• Database Persistence: If a Gateway is logging a cell to a database, the server will automatically query the database for the historic chart data. Once the data is retrieved, it is cached (See Data Caching above), so subsequent requests for the same cell will not query the database. If MySQL database is used, the MySQL Connector/J JDBC driver needs to be downloaded and placed in the lib/ directory. It needs to be renamed to mysql-connector.jar.

Configuration Options:

• Title - The string displayed in the title of the gadget.
• X-Axis - The string displayed along the x-axis of the gadget.
• Y-Axis - The string displayed along the y-axis of the gadget.
• Retention Duration - The duration (in minutes) of data to be persisted by the line chart.
• Show Gridlines - Shows or hides the chart gridlines.
• Show Legend - Shows or hides the legend from the chart.
• Legend Position - Position of the legend. This can be combined with the Float Legend.
• Float Legend - Sets the position of the legend. If checked, the legend will float over the chart. Otherwise, the legend will be rendered above the chart.
• Series Name - Configures which names can be used as series name. Options include Entity, Dataview, Row and Column name, with corresponding checkboxes.
• Path - Contains strings specifying the Geneos XPath corresponding to the data series from which the line chart data is taken. This path must resolve to a cell or a path containing multiple numeric cells. If a path resolves to multiple numeric cells, each cell will be represented in its own line. One or more data paths corresponding to a numeric data series can be specified to be displayed in the chart.

Pie Chart

The Pie Chart gadget provides a graphical pie chart representation of Geneos data, displaying the latest values of different data series in a segmented pie chart. The chart is capable of displaying both the latest values of the data series and their relative percentile against other data series included in the chart.

Configuration Options:

• Title - The string displayed in the title of the gadget.
• Paths - Contains strings specifying the Geneos XPath corresponding to the data series from which the pie chart segment data is taken. This path must resolve to a cell or a path containing multiple numeric cells. If a path resolves to multiple numeric cells, all of the cells will be used as a segment in the pie chart. Two or more data paths can be specified to be displayed in the chart.

Connections

The Connections gadget provides a visualisation of the set of Geneos Gateways to which the Web Montage server (via Open Access) is connected. The gadget visualises the connections as a table with one row per connection.

Table Legend:

• Severity - The color represents the worst severity of the connected Gateway
• Name - Gateway Name, as configured in Gateway setup
• Host - Hostname or IP of machine where Gateway is running
• Port - Gateway listen port
• Status - Connection status (Connected, Error, Disabled)

This gadget is not configurable.

URL

The URL gadget allows the user to specify a URL to be rendered in the gadget. This allows a wide range of external web pages and information sources to be integrated with the product.

Configuration Options:

• URL - A valid Uniform Resource Locator (URL) pointing to a web page or other online resource
• Height - Height of the gadget in pixels. Note that the width of the gadget is determined by the overall layout configuration of the page.

The following variables can be used in URL gadget:

• {xpath}
• {gateway}
• {probe}
• {managedEntity}

HTML

The HTML gadget allows the user to input HTML to be rendered in the gadget. This allows the gadget to be used for a wide range of purposes (e.g., creating gadgets to be used as titles, fixed text or image-based gadgets of links to other pages).

This gadget does not support Javascript.

Configuration Options:

• Title - The string displayed in the title of the gadget.
• HTML - The text of the HTML page or snippet to be rendered. This is rendered directly by your browser, so any valid HTML expression can be used.

The following variables can be used in HTML gadget:

• {xpath}
• {gateway}
• {probe}
• {managedEntity}

Step 1: Edit config files

Edit <GENEOSWS_CONFIG_HOME>/system.properties and change the following settings:

webapp.ssl.port=8443
webapp.protocol=https

Edit <GENEOSWS_CONFIG_HOME>/http-server.xml and

Comment out section:

<bean id="Connector" class="org.eclipse.jetty.server.nio.SelectChannelConnector">         <property name="port" value="#{ systemProperties['webapp.port'] }" /></bean>
									

Uncomment section:

<bean id="SslConnector" class="org.eclipse.jetty.server.ssl.SslSocketConnector">                <property name="port" value="#{ systemProperties['webapp.ssl.port'] }" />    <property name="keystoreType" value="JCEKS" />    <property name="truststoreType" value="JCEKS" />    <property name="keystore" value="#{ systemProperties['GENEOSWS_CONFIG_HOME'] }/keystore.db" />    <property name="truststore" value="#{ systemProperties['GENEOSWS_CONFIG_HOME'] }/keystore.db" />    <property name="password" value="ab987c" />    <property name="trustPassword" value="ab987c" /></bean>
									

Step 2: Configure SSL Certificates

There are two ways to configure an SSL certificate on the server:

• Generate a new self-signed certificate
• Import an existing certificate for your domain name

Generate a self-signed SSL certificate:

Run ./util/ssl_util.sh from GENEOS_BIN_HOME directory and specify the hostname/ip address of the box. This will generate the certificate and add it to a keystore.

cd <GENEOS_BIN_HOME>./util/ssl_util.sh add <hostname_or_ip>

The script assumes that the Web Montage config directory is $HOME/.geneos/webservices/config. If your config is in another location, please update the script.

Restart your Web Montage server and verify that the certificate is being used by opening the following page: https://hostname_or_ip:8443/session. The browser will warn you that the SSL certificate is not trusted - this is expected behavior. Add an exclusion rule (or continue).

If the websocket connection fails in SSL mode, point your browser to https://<hostname_or_ip>:<websocket.port>/session and accept a security exception. Refresh the web application.

Import an existing certificate for your domain:

If the server running Web Montage has an existing SSL certificate issued by a Certificate Authority (CA), you will need to import that certificate and its private key into the server’s keystore.

1. Convert your existing certificate and private key into PKCS12 format. Your certificate file needs to be called <hostname_or_ip>.cer.

cd <GENEOS_BIN_HOME>./util/ssl_util.sh convert <hostname_or_ip> <private_key_file>

2. If your CA provides multiple intermediary certificates, you will need to combine them into a single file using the command:

cat my_cert.cer intermedate1.cer intermediate2.cer > hostname_or_ip.cer

3. Import the newly converted certificate using the command and specify the Export Password from Step 1.

./util/ssl_util.sh import <hostname_or_ip> <export_password>

Step 1: Backup configuration files

1. Create a backup of existing .geneos/webservices/data directory.
2. Delete existing .geneos folder.

Step 2: Download and Run new Montage

1. Delete installation folder of old Web Montage version.
2. Download Web Montage version 3.1.x and extract in desired directory.
3. Run new montage. This will create a new .geneos folder in the home directory.

Step 3: Configure Montage

1. Edit system.properties in .geneos/webservices/config directory to add the web server and open access connection details.
2. Copy the contents of the backed up data folder and paste them into the newly created .geneos/webservices/data directory.

Step 4: Restart Montage