Telling Stories with Your Network Monitoring Dashboard | Entuity Tech Talk
Well, so as those the doorbells of people joining start to slow down. So this is our Entuity tech talk. If you guys have been before these are you'll know that these are kind of informal by design, right? There's not a bunch of slideware nobody. Nobody from sales is here, right. We're just trying to spread some awareness about interesting topics and hopefully we've cleared the bar today for ourselves and and you guys that it, it is technical enough and and has some value. And so if you have questions, use the Q&A function as we go. My
name's Jordan McPherson, I'm the Director of Products. I oversee Entuity Software. And so I will be you know keeping time and and so if you have questions and we, I'll interrupt these guys and and get them to answer or answer myself, right. So let them fly throughout. We'll do a couple of polls throughout just to sort of get a feel for.
How you guys are doing things today or or what lines up with the talk and so you know, just a little bit of inside baseball when we think about these talks, it's for us the the bar is do we have something worth talking about right. And and do we think it's going to be enough you know value to you guys as users to to want to hear that, right. So it's not the regular, you know, scheduled demo stuff for prospects this is meant to be. You know, how do we use Entuity to solve you know a business challenge or or technical problem within our work, right And and kind of get better. And so joining me today from our
solution architect group or both Pete Bartz and John Diamond, some of you guys might have worked with them in the past or or maybe even when you were deploying Entuity, right. So they are. Both been around the product for a long time and both as a user Pete and and now part of Intuity for a while now and JD and a couple of different roles. I think I learned of a different functioning served for Intuity all the time. So, so for today we want to talk about dashboards, You know when we were thinking about it in the last year, we've spent a lot of time on. User defined polling and custom integrations, third party integrations using web hooks, right. And so how do we get like
more better, richer data into Entuity, right. Things that maybe we wouldn't have thought about in the past or or whatever else, right. And that's great. We've got it in Intuity. I know there's kind of this like we've got all this data now what? Right. And so there's really this question of, you know, how
do you. Use that data to tell a story beyond just you know eventing or or whatever else. And so I'm going to launch a poll and really what I'm trying to to capture here should be a multi select is you know when you guys are using Entuity dashboards today what what are you using them to do right. So is it you
know communicating status or availability to like leadership or business groups, right so. You know, pay boss the you know the network's up real really well. You know I have an MB O tied to that or look at what a great job I'm doing right. Or is it more of a operations view you know, something like a service team or or a NOC maybe is is primarily using it. Is it a troubleshooting thing? Right. Hey, we've got a ticket or somebody reported a problem. Let me go. You know, drill in and and take a look at what's going
on. Or maybe something else, right. If it's other go ahead and put it in the chat what the other might be. So you know I think
that really fits in when we think about the out-of-the-box Entuity network monitoring dashboards, you know we've really built those two, one show as much data about the devices that are monitored as possible and two to catch sort of the. The minimum you know, everybody likes to know these sorts of things, right? Which most businesses aren't really the same. Most teams aren't the same, right? So they're really not meant to be exhaustive or or always the right answer. Which is why we've spent a lot of time making these customizable and and and you know, configurable, right? And so. When we talk about dashboards for network monitoring, we get into this kind of chicken and the egg problem of, you know, so I've gathered this data and really when I was setting up monitoring, I was focused on, you know, eventing, right. I want incidents so that I can respond and and go fix something, right? And then we get the dashboards and, you know, it's really easy to just sort of here's everything. I monitor for faults, put it in a
dashboard, right? But what can happen there is you get into kind of this dashboard fatigue, right. You've got this big scroll of all these metrics or statuses and and it, you know, you know, somebody looks at it and they're like okay, well, what am I looking at, right? Or what's this tell me or or why do I care? And so then they kind of lose value, they lose interest or don't want to look at it or whatever else, right. And so we have to make sure we have the right data there for what we're trying to do from a. From a monitoring perspective, so that it can show up in the dashboards and so that can be, you know, an interesting thought, right? You know, we've used the word in the past like monitor what matters, right? Because that's what's gonna end up on dashboards, right? It can be really easy to, you know, turn everything on and and it's all interesting and so it goes on a dashboard, right. And so then I'm gonna. I spend my entire poll budget here in the front end of the meeting and and I'll launch another one. And So what this one is about is really trying to gauge where the group's at, right. So you know, are you using dashboards just, you know
the out-of-the-box suits your needs or or you haven't gone into customization yet, right. Maybe you've customized the out-of-the-box views to add additional. Information, right? Or you know, pull on. I need a new dashboard to solve some problem, right? And so just circling back to the last poll, looks like most everybody is using for operations views, right? Stack and so 52% right? So I would expect that to be pretty common for for intuity. And then 29% for troubleshooting, great, that makes sense. We have a lot of good dashboards for that, but
only 14% for communicating to the business. So hopefully we can have some converts today right in the using Intuity to to communicate back to the business. So yeah, that's great. So you know on that front.
So I've got Pete and JD here with me, so I get to shut up real soon and let smart people talk. We're gonna go through some some of the newer features with network monitoring software dashboards that might have been launched. Maybe since you've had a demo or whatever else I am gonna tease out. So we've had a pretty significant amount of feedback from users around this need for. You know, I've got a kiosk or I've got a, you know, monitor in my, you know, near my network operations area. Or you know, my boss just cannot log in and navigate right? I just want to send him a direct link and then there's the dashboard, right? So just a few short weeks, latest patch will be released and in there we've included a feature that will do a token based login.
Right. So you'll be able to to do those public dashboards so they'll be accessible to for kiosks and knock views and and you know maybe people that don't need access to all of Intuity, right. Hopefully to make life a little simpler for for everyone. So go ahead and respond to those polls if you. Just throughout looks like we got a pretty good response rate. Also looks like a lot of folks in this meeting have done some new dashboards before. So hopefully we'll have some tips and tricks here today to to to get on the next level. So you
know, Pete, I know you do a lot of these back from when you were a user and now in your role as a, you know, solution architect and there's always that. Seems to be a common one that, that comes up a lot that you were gonna tell us about today, right, The what's in Entuity kind of question. You're on mute, Pete. There you go. Yep. Yeah. So the question, you know, as you mentioned earlier, the
question of, you know, you'd go through the onboarding, you start looking at what you're monitoring. But the question is what have I got? And that story really comes across you know differently depending upon different folks that need to be able to look at it. So my goal today is to just share a number of dashboards. These are things that you know we've delivered. I, I work with customers certainly have have pushed these types of dashboards, help customers actually develop these, but really they're intended to tell a story about what you've got. So let's take a look at the first one. And again, this is just, you know, a simple dashboard that leverages a table that but also looks at, you know, the types of devices that I've got. So I've got a list of devices in a
table. I could rename this to devices or whatever I'd like, but I've got information about devices in a tabular form that's really easy to implement. A lot of customers have done that already. But the nice part about this one is I can roll that information up and break it out by different types of attributes so I can look at the types of devices.
How many firewalls do I have? How many routers do I have? You know go down the line. Again, these are done automatically based on what the devices are and what's being modeled by manufacturer. Same type of thing. How many Dell devices do I have? How many Cisco devices do I have? Go all the way down this devices by model, same type of thing. Again, this story is
really just intended to tell me about type of devices and what I've got and then from there if I need to be able to export this out just like any other table. Just export the data. So you know this would be I think a comparison to some of the existing reports that are in the system. But from a UI perspective it's really easy to get that picture. I just you know a variant of that if I look
at it instead of you know looking at manufacturers, I'll just quickly drill into models and types and look at versions. So when I'm looking specifically in that Cisco realm and I want to be able to say. How many different version you know 12.2 these are old 35 fifties I believe in my that we've got. But how many of these devices do I have now if I want to get more information about that notice the color coding on this. I can actually just break this out and build show me a list. Here's the devices that
are running that version. So you can use the dashboards in the in the pie chart style for visibility, but you can also leverage those to kind of narrow down and drill into. Various components by type. Just another example that I've used, you know, leveraging certification, when you look at asset management and you're onboarding devices, understanding what devices are certified and what devices may not be certified is something that you can do from, you know, the asset management pages. But this is just kind of an admin level I would say your administrators probably would have access to something like this.
What does get an idea again of what have I got? What are the list of devices that I'm managing? Do I have things that are not certified, things that I need to look at certification for leveraging Entuity support? One more example that we'll look at is to look at here. We'll look at this one. This is gets into pretty small pie charts, but that's okay. I'm looking at the classic stuff again, but I've added into this. A custom attribute. So I've added an attribute in the into
the system. It's actually looking at stinks categories. So these are official Stinks categories that are, you know, defined by dissa. But I've applied these two devices in a lot of cases. I don't actually have them applied. But this is again just a way to leverage something that is beyond kind of out-of-the-box monitoring into a custom attribute and add that into a, you know, dashboard that makes it more visible as well. So I've got a firewall, I've got a server, I've got some devices that aren't set, and I've got a bunch of devices that don't have the sticks category set on them at all. But I can leverage this as a method for either reporting or just visualization. I'm
hoping this gives some ideas on how to find different ways to look at what you've got. Jordan, I'll turn it back over to you. Yeah, that's great. I think we're all looking for that. Source of truth when it comes to you know the the the simple question of what do I have on my network. So this is a really helpful way to to take this data and and be able to look through it. Especially if there isn't you know another inventory tool or or source of truth there right? So this is really a good one.
And so this is kind of taking the the metadata of of things we already have and and bringing it together in a you know, joined up way. What about you know JD, I know that we have times where operationally A-Team you know cares differently about what data should be highlighted or or brought up first, right so. You know, how how might somebody go about doing that, right. So
they can use the dashboards, you know, more quickly for either operational views or, you know, troubleshoot work? Yep, definitely. And in fact, this example I'm about to show you came from one of my customers who were focused on monitoring NetApp storage devices. Now we. Support a number of different storage devices, many different vendors, several models within certain vendors like Dell EMC, there's a whole range of different models and families of support UH for UH different of their storage devices. We provide one out-of-the-box summary dashboard Now if I were to go and take a quick look at UM.
Now all of my devices that I've got under management here and I'm just gonna filter down to the storage store and these are a couple of Dell EMC VNX storage units and a net app. Now if I were to take a look at this, I know it's offline, but it doesn't really matter. So here's the Dell. VNX Unit and this is what the standard summary dashboard for Storage Device looks like. You'll notice it's got a list of the physical disk drives that exist within the unit. Now that may be very appropriate for some users, but if I were to go back and we'll take a look at that net app. The customer I worked with really wasn't very interested in the physical disk drives. They wanted to see the storage
volumes. Now we took the standard summary dashboard for storage devices and have modified it so that it can leverage the vendor or the manufacturer to make a decision as to which storage. Summary dashboard to show you So this is actually a different summary dashboard. They're both called Summary, but this one is showing if this is a net app. As the manufacturer, we've replaced the volume, the physical disk dashlet here with the table that shows the volumes.
Now the couple of things that are worth noting. First of all, if I were to go in and actually show you by editing this dashboard, how that decision was made as to which dashboard to show. This dashboard, if I go to the advanced settings, has a filter. So we're applying a filter. We've added a filter. And it's looking at the manufacturer attribute and saying the manufacturer has to equal net app in order for this dashboard to be displayed. If it were a storage device but it
wasn't a net app, then this doesn't qualify and this dashboard would not be shown and it will default back to the the default storage dashboard that showed you the physical disk drives. So that's a very important aspect. That dashboard level filter, Now when it comes to the volumes, that table, if I were to go in and take a look here, you're going to see that I've said that I want the hardware volumes and that is going to be derived from whichever hardware volumes belong to the currently selected unit. So this is a dynamic dashboard that is taking whatever the context in the explorer is to identify the unit that we want to focus on and it's showing you the volumes that belong to that unit. I've added a bunch of attributes down here, but importantly in the advanced settings. I've got two advanced
settings in here. One of them is the sort order. If you look here the provisioned used percent. I wanted that one in descending order so that it shows the volumes that are the most full at the top. In addition to that NetApp has a strange aspect that many of the storage volumes.
Are snapshot volumes that really aren't of interest to most of the users. They have dot snapshot in their name. So down here I've put an additional filter on the table that says the name if it contains the string dot snapshot then because I've inverted the filter. That will cause it to be hidden. So if a volume name contains dot snapshot, you will not see it. It filters them out because they're really not of any interest. So with that done,
that was how that volume table was set up and so you can leverage those filters and the default sort order to achieve that display down here. Okay, Jordan, back to you. So, so JD, just just to hammer down on a on a couple things you said there. So we can have the context menu, right? So the the the bread crumbs, right, What kind of app you're in Drive, which version of a dashboard comes in? Right. So that's absolutely, that's the very important concept. So you this is an example with storage devices. I
have another customer who has a number of different manufacturers of firewall and they wanted to show subtly different dashboards for different types of firewall and this would allow you to do it. You could say if it's this manufacturer or even a different version of firewall from the same manufacturer, you could create a subtly different dashboard for it. Based upon you know what matters for for that version or or whatever else right. I I know with with storage it's always I
probably already always drive store Jammins nuts. Because for me I just always say Lun right And depending on the manufacturer it it's a volume group it's a you know all these different things right. But I. Some some money, some equipment you might be more focused on loans some you might be more focused on volumes. And so that
distinction matters and this is how we can help and make that much easier at runtime. Well and then this also helps with the I've got 50 dashboards always showing up on the right, you know the the right navigation menu, right. So I'm I'm getting the the proper dashboards if and when I need them right as opposed to. Always right. Hopefully avoid the empty dashboard or not
Applicables, right? That kind of stuff. That's right. In this particular case, I've got two different storage dashboards, both called Summary and it will pick the one that is appropriate based upon the vendor that you're looking at, right? And if I were to create a, a a a whole new dashboard that I only wanted to apply to to Netapps, that wasn't summary, right? By being able to scope that when I'm looking at, you know, a server or a network device, that dashboard wouldn't even, you know, be available, right? It would be completely missing from the menus if you were not looking at a net app. Perfect. Great, great. No, that's awesome. And it is. It is interesting, you know when you when you get from, you know kind of the the tools team to the you know, to the actual. Infrastructure owner, you know to the kind of the end user right where they start to want to see, you know what matters to them in these dashboards, right from an operational from a troubleshooting standpoint. So definitely understand the the
need there. One quick thing I just would like to point out in the dashboard configuration tool. This is that dashboard I created for NetApp and you will notice that there is a column called filtered. And this is showing, yes. Most of the others are showing no.
There's another one on this VMware dashboard because in a very similar way at the moment we have extra information available for VMware that isn't being monitored for Hyper V and other virtualization platforms. And so we have an enhanced dashboard. In the VMware world. And so this one is filtered to only show you the VM platform dashboard here for VMware. If it is a VMware system you're looking at. If it's something else, it will default back to the other one in a very similar way to what I've just shown you with net app, you know? And so you open this up and I'm glad you did. I'm gonna take us off script cuz that's
the point here. You know we've also got this this group access column I see on this, this page here, right. And I think this is a another you know, really powerful feature when we're talking about you know scoping dashboards and and how we you know use them to to tell stories, right. So you know a lot of people might think of this in the vein of like a role based access, right. So
where we want to have. Maybe a group that's called, you know, the the network team, right? And so they've got different dashboards than, you know, the server team or there could be application teams or location driven. Talk a little bit about that, if you will, JD, hopefully I didn't steal too much of that with my opining there. Absolutely. I mean going back to what you were saying
earlier, if you have. Too many dashboards available. It can become confusing. There are occasions where, particularly for a group of users who have a very defined role, where only a handful or even fewer dashboards are relevant, it might be better not to provide them access to all of the dashboards and limit this down to only providing the ones. To simplify their life without extraneous distractions, and this is a way that you can control which groups of users have access to which dashboards, though you can apply that fine tuning to sharpen up the user interface to be more specific for different user communities, I can definitely think of a handful of bosses I've had. In my life where I wanted to have have them have less dashboards, right. So yes, senior executives, you may not
want to show them everything. Yeah, exactly. OK Well, hey, thanks so much for taking us through that. I think that's pretty common use case, right, where you know the, the default has the data but it doesn't give it to you in in exactly the right way, you know or or what your operations team is looking for. Right. So how do we, how do we tune that? Right. So I think that. You know, if we look at the kind of the poll data, you know, we do see that a lot of folks have customized the out of the out-of-the-box dashboards, right? Hopefully doing something similar and hopefully that was helpful. You know, So Pete, I
think another challenge we see is there's a lot of different network devices out there. Right that that can be monitored from Intuity and but sometimes we're not great at it right out-of-the-box and and and so you know we're aware of that and and so we've you know we've done some time on these user defined polars whether it's rest or or SNMP right and and empowering you know tools teams and and that office teams to extend through. But again, you know, from earlier, right? I've got this data now. What? Right. Yeah, maybe take us through this
example. Yeah. I mean, the idea is we collect a lot of data from a lot of different devices, but there's always gonna be something out there. There's a couple cases, and this is actually one of the environments that we've got at Park Place as well. But this is looking at things like environmentals, whether it's a UPS or in this case, this is total Power Distribution. You know air conditioning, temperature, power, these types of things. So you know in the Intuity system we added additional metrics to be able to cover these things and again leveraging as an MP as a method to do that via user defined polling or using the API methods to do the same thing. In this
case we actually added a bunch of power information and we just this is more of a tactical operational. Dashboard, but it's just looking at power, it's looking at usage, it's looking at AMP usage and generating events and things like that. But I want to be a little more creative because the story I want to tell is something that, you know, maybe a little bit more graphical, but I want to focus on something like power or actual temperature. You know, we've got top of cabinet, top of row methods to be able to look at temperature in each data center cabinet.
So we can, we're certainly labeling these to be able to identify the role in the data center and which cab they're in, but the ability to very quickly see temp is something you can leverage a dashboard for. Now this is an interesting one because it's not using a fixed kind of panel for the dashboard. It's actually a scrolling method because I've certainly got more things that I want to be able to display than I can fit in the page. So this is using a scrolling method and it's
actually just using. A, a meter gauge which is something that the standard out-of-the-box dashboards, there's not a lot of cases where we've added that in. So customers might not know about this, but the ability to actually look at an attribute and look at something like temperature, put a gauge against it, identify a threshold, that's where you see the red bar and I'll give you an idea of what it looks like. So you can see here that this is a a scrolling style Dashboards, we've set up different columns so we've got individual sections and.
6 sections across this left to right. But each one of these dashlets is then set up to monitor a specific object and pick out the temperature sensor. So the interesting part about this this is very, you know, this is pretty standard stuff to be able to look at, you know, pick the object and device that you want to be able to focus on. But the interesting part about this is we're leveraging a gauge, so the gauge is going to look at the temperature value. And in here I've actually got the ability to set the min and Max methods for the gauge. I've set this to, you know, go as
high as 200 degrees. It's pretty high, but I'm rendering it as a dial style and I'm adding some text on it. Now the interesting part too is I've added in a defined threshold, so I've actually set the threshold definition at a percentage of the maximum, so percentage of 200. So I'm doing this at the dashboard level. This isn't
engaging an alert of any sort. This is actually for visualization. But I'm setting colors, you know, I'm setting this effectively. And then from that, if I just preview this one, all of these different gauges are going to pick up that data automatically refresh, but again, visually see kind of in a meter form in that dial style to be able to see what's going on. So that's just one example.
Kind of another way to leverage some of that same data. Again, this is all custom data. These are just leveraging attributes that are added into the system. You know, out-of-the-box
attributes can leverage the same type of methods as well. But this is just using a a vertical, you know, vertical gauge right here. So I'm just doing a bar chart type thing. So I'm putting a threshold, same threshold on here, identifying where I've got percentage of of used amps. So if I if I hit the maximum amp load, again, this is a scrolling style. Just a little bit different way to look at this. Let's look at another example. I'm going to move it out of the
kind of the large scale data center into cases where you've got distributed. Ups's APC UPS is all over the environment. I've got a number of these that are being modeled. I'm picking up specific metrics. Again, I'm using user defined polling to collect that information. And I built a dashboard that says just show me all my Ups's and I want to pick which one I want to look at some data for.
So just a dynamic dashboard to pick up and pull some chart based information, looking at load, looking at temperature. Certainly runtime and battery capacity are things that you'd want to pay attention to. So this is kind of a high level look if I took a look at you know the one one of the Apc's that I've got being modeled. I wanted to look at what JD did on the storage side because the I've got this additional data added to the system, but I'd like the summary dashboard to be configured in a fashion where it's unique to that type of device. So I'm going to modify
the summary to be able to pick up you know, UPS related metrics. Again, here I've got a different, you know, different gauge style to be able to pick up. One thing to note with the gauges, when you set these up, you can actually put multiple gauges in a dashlet. And they'll actually assemble themselves like side by side all the way across the dashlet definition or a dashlet size. So
if I made this dashlet bigger, I can put multiple gauges. You don't have to have one gauge per dashlet if you don't want to, similar to what you saw in the earlier panel. But this is just showing some custom metrics. Again, I've modified this to
pick up metrics that are specific to this type of an APC. So when I look at that device and go to the summary, it's going to actually show this. Now I was building this sort of in alignment with when JD was talking. So there's one panel here that I've, I've got some
real estate open and what I'd like to be able to do, the one thing that I was missing was some voltage information. So inbound outbound voltage, you actually see it here where I've got inbound outbound voltage as a chart. I'm actually going to show you how to add that in. So there's actually a kind of a unique.
Trick. Call it a trick, but it's something where when you're building dashboards, you can set up these charts one of a couple different ways. I can add a chart just like I would normally and pick the metrics, so I can build a dashlett from scratch and do it as a chart style. Or if I've got a chart in another dashboard, say this one, right here, I'm just in the normal viewing mode, but I'm just going to drag this dashboard up into my other browser tab.
And drop it down in the editor, it's going to resize itself. So I'm going to leverage this definition as part of this dashboard. Now with this one, if I go back to this original one, this is a view based dashboard, so this chart is based on a selection that I'm picking in this table. Now in this case I've already got my contacts set, so it's this isn't going to work. I'm just going to modify it so you can see that. I'm using a dashlet as a source. I'm just going to modify this, select it back to the dashboard, and based on that, you know, just a dashboard source where it's going to pick up your context. It's going to maintain all of the chart settings that
I've got, so I didn't have to pick and choose. It just makes it easier and I'm going to preview it so you know, just a trick on how to actually you could create these charts manually. But more effectively, just drag them from one other dashboard and put them in, especially if they're a dashboard template style chart. You can modify the the the individual components of the dashlet as well. I'll just show you one more example. This is the Power Distribution that I was referring to is really your user defined S&P polling, but.
This device is actually using an API method to connect to, and we've used this in other tech talks as well. But to go to openweathermap.org, pick up the temperature for a specific city. This happens to be a device that we're managing. We just called it Mayfield Heights and we're picking up temperature. But this is just another example of what charts can look like. Again, to tell you that story about, you know, a specific scenario.
Just a different way to visualize. This can be really handy as well. It's built the same way but it's using the REST API methods well and and Pete I I think this is a good illustration of why it can be so hard to answer the question of can intuity monitor that because the answers pretty much yes, usually yes. It's just a matter of you know the important question is how right not not can so. You know these are really cool. I know we've had some a lot of
ESG and and data center infrastructure discussions going on right around you know temperature and and power draw and and things like that. So this is all really expanding the scope of what could you know what could be pulled into intuity and and leveraged and used right and and not just. You know I I need alerts if we're on battery right. But actually getting into you know additional data from there it looks like this is you know this group doesn't have a ton of ESG happening now but you know good to know and and I think this to your point with the weather this would apply to to kind of anything right. This is just our.
The example we have in the lab right now if you will, yeah, well great. So I think the you know at the beginning I I asked you know who's using this for for business users or who's using it for operations views and I I think we've done a good job walking through some different use cases there but. A lot of these are are not going to be that helpful when when I'm when I'm troubleshooting right And I've got an active issue.
Polling only happens so frequently and and you know, whether it's microbursts on a network or you know CPU usage trying to to catch when it's high versus low, it can be kind of frustrating. JD, do we have anything for that? That was a terrible setup. I'm sorry guys. Go ahead okay. Well, what I am in a position to show you is how you can actually leverage our high speed poller that's known as ticker hopefully most if not all of you are aware of. A ticker and let me just give you a standard little demo. So if I were to go find a device, let's say I'm gonna go through a device down here, I could go find a port on this device, let's say that port, right click and you've got a ticker option here to go. Pick one or multiple attributes that you're gonna
pull rapidly and that means. On a one second basis, by default you can pull more slowly, but this will after a few seconds initialize and start polling the utilization. So it's gonna take the traffic and factor that into the line speed and show you that interactively so you see that data appearing. Here it goes. Data samples are starting to come in and you can use it however. This doesn't have to be manually configured like that. You can
incorporate one or multiple ticket charts into a dashboard. Now most normally when we put a chart in a dashboard, it's pulling data from the database to show you in the chart. A ticket chart is different, but the ticket chart gathers its data in real time from a device. It doesn't put it in the
database, it just use it for charting purposes. Now if I were to go back, I've created a dashboard. This one will operate at a view level. I could have had it so that it operated at a device or even a port level. But here I'm going to have a dashboard. I called it ports with ticker and it has
built a list of all of the ports within the selected view. This one had 14108 ports. The table within our dashboards will automatically cap at 1000 entries, so this is showing you the 1st 1000 according to the default sort order which was putting the port with the highest inbound utilization over the period of the the dashboard is set to operate in. At the top. If I wanted to choose the remaining ports, I could just select them over here. Now what this is also done
is it's enabled me to link up a couple of other charts. I've got 1 ticket chart focused on utilization, the other one on false. If I were to pick an entry down here, let's go pick this one here I'm just going to select it. And these ticket charts are wired. To this dashlett on the left, which means when I select an entry in the table on the left, it then allows the charts on the right to know what it is that they're supposed to be showing you data on. And they are now initializing ticker to show you
inbound and outbound utilization on the top and if there were any faults then you would see them down the bottom here. So it did take a few seconds, some around 20 to 30 seconds in this case, to do that initialization. But you weren't having to pull stuff off a menu, you were just selecting whichever port you were interested in. If down here, for example, I see that we've got some outbound faults on this port, I go and select it. It will then reinitialize those ticket charts on the right. So that we'll then get both utilization and fault showing up within a few seconds. It'll initialize ticker to start
pulling that data in. So the difference between ticker and regular polling is that normally there is no ticker polling happening. It only actually starts polling when somebody needs the data and so it's on an as needed basis. And so there you've got your data coming in.
Now there were a few things I just wanted to point out about how this was created. Let's go in and actually go to the editor and I'm gonna take a look at how this utilization panel was configured. First of all, the dashlet source was not Dashboard, that's the default, which means that it would take whatever was being used as the context in the explorer. That's not relevant here because this is actually a view based dashboard.
And ticker won't operate at the view level. So this is using a dashlet. And which dashport A dashlet is it using? It's using this one called port list which is over here on the left. And so whichever entry, whichever row you select in that table becomes the context for this dashlet. This is going to be focused on a port. And I have added two new series in here for monitoring. If you
take a look at the first one, I called it in keeping the name short and sweet because I'd already called the. In the title of this chart I put utilization. So if I said in utilization that would be a little superfluous. Got the color defined, I left it default and here. Instead of the default which is to take from a stream which means data in the database, I chose ticker. Then it asked me to enter an OID. Now I could enter a numeric SNMP OID.
Although in this case it understands how to compute utilization and there are two special strings in here, in utilization and out utilization which will cause it. To pull in the traffic and then a factor that into the line speed to get the percentage utilization as its percentage. I told it that the unit was gonna be percentage and that didn't need any further configuration to operate. Now there is a
subtlety when it comes to the faults. If I were to show you here, we're pulling that data in. Using a string to identify the OID which is in or if in M2 errors, so that's MIP 2 errors incidentally, if you configure up a A ticker. Screen you'll be able to see these these strings. I said the
unit was gonna be packets because this is gonna be a packet rate, but this by default is actually gonna give me an absolute packet count since that counter was last reset. Now that's not what I want to show, I want to be showing a difference between samples if you look further down. There is an option which is normally turned off and that is to show ticker rate. This will cause it to perform delta
calculations between samples. In other words, what is what has changed between the previous sample and this one. You can then tell it to compute the output based upon either seconds, minutes, hours or days. I wanted this as not per second
basis and I wanted the legend. To be always visible so that you can actually see the legend at the bottom of the chart. So those were the key things that I made the change on here and that achieved that end result so that I was getting a fault rate in terms of packets per second rather than that absolute fault count, which frankly isn't an awful lot of use to many people. So that. Was the the fundamental tricks, you might call them that we used to create it? And this point back to you, Jordan. No, I I think that's that's great. I have to admit this was one of
those features that I think I'd been using Intuity for months and somebody went, well, why don't you use the ticker And I went the what, That's great. Right. So I think you could go a long time you know being a regular user of Intuity and and not even knowing that that functionality is there or or when you might want to use it. So this is a really I'm glad we got to show this today and and I this is way easier right Especially from a you know if I have a known SAT or or whatever else. Well and this could also be filtered since it's a view by location or.
By teams, right. So a lot of role based access there. So that you know in a larger environment I might have a lot more than 1400 ports and so that's really helpful. So I'll do a last call for any questions on the topics today. Hopefully this was helpful and and and spur some creativity on on what we. You know how you guys might use Intuity to you know engage with the the business or or leadership to to tell the story of the infrastructure. I'm gonna launch the final poll. This one's an easy one I think but really just you know what topic should we cover in the future right. You know I I said at the
beginning for us we we really want to make sure that these are. You know informative and and helpful and and you know live up to the moniker of tech talk right and aren't just you know regular demo. So go ahead and put those in and and maybe that'll help us as we're trying to pick the next ones and so that so that it matters to you guys, right. That's a big thing for us and I know that. You know we appreciate you taking the time to to be here with us. I know it's end of day for some or right in the middle of the morning for others and and so it's always tough to find time on calendar. So really appreciate it that we have that.
I don't know if everybody else can see this but it's building a really nice like word cloud on my side here which is great and. And things like that. So I don't think I have any other housekeeping and I'm just double checking my notes here and I don't think we've had any other questions come in unless I missed them, I don't think so, so.
You know, with that, Pete, do you want to tell us about your, your water leak? No, I'm kidding. We can. I'll hang on till the end of kind of scheduled time. But if there's nothing else have a great rest of your your week and we should see, oh, here we go. Is there any way to copy dashlets within the dashboard? So Pete, I think you showed a little bit how to copy dashlets. Across dashboards, right. But can we dupe 1 so that it's maybe along the way for us you you can do it in a fashion where you're leveraging more than one tab. So if you if you're modifying a
dashboard, so you save the state of that dashboard, open it up in its save state in another tab and drag that same chart over into the edit Edit version on the other tab. So yeah, effectively you can do that. Naturally, the easiest way to do that would be to duplicate the tab. Yep, Yep, Jared, these
are recorded and they'll be posted on the Park Place Technologies website. Usually in a couple of days. They added out all my ums and they've gotta tighten up my figure so that I look camera ready. But otherwise they they go up pretty fast. Well, thank you very much. I, I, you know it's it's always you
know the zoom fatigue of being on camera, right. So let's see if as I look at this kind of word cloud if anything stands out to me. Jordan, you made a comment about you know as JD was talking about the ticker was being able to show sort of a look of multiple.
You know, we talked about multiple ports, large numbers of ports, but the ability to use a ticker in a dashboard that tells you about all your significant sites at once, you know, not hundreds, but you know, if you've got a handful of sites, just have one dashboard that launches a whole bunch of tickers in parallel to tell that story. That's something that is very doable as well. Ohh, this is interesting. So Google map integration as a
topic, I think that that could be fascinating, right to go through kind of the how to make sure Google Maps are set up right and then also how to do the like, gosh, we could probably talk for an hour and a half just about that that that whole dashlet right of. Google Maps versus topological views and Visio and everything else right that sounds like it could be interesting. Ohh and somebody I do see water leak on there so somebody does would like a an RCA deep dive tech talk on water leak so maybe we can schedule that one out of cycle. Well I'm I'm monitoring my water system in my house with Attuity so I could tell I had a water leak ahead of time so. Yeah, Okay. Well, great integrations with Cisco. Yeah,
there was a a good question in the Q&A section about Cisco and the life data and I know we've used that as one of our examples for the REST API Polar Tech talk, right. Another one that I did point out is that Cisco has a open Vauln API that allows you to. Look up for a for a given device and firmware version, what are the known CVS for it and then also what's the recommended upgrade, right so this tools available from Cisco on the web as like a web browser, right? But you've got a like click right? So with a reasonably complex network can be really time consuming. So they do have that as a a REST API option. That would be, I think an interesting candidate for REST API to, you know, enrich the data that's there. All right.
Let me do one last check on the work cloud kind of refresh. I do see some question around scripting and config management. I think config management could be a really interesting topic to go through just because it can get so.
So very technical, right. So we'll, that might be 1 to look at. But then some questions around storage. I know that's newer to the Intuity discussion, right. It might be worth bringing in somebody from that team to to talk even a little bit about what we're doing and how that works, right. I think I
could, I got a friend on that development team. That we could borrow, but when I see Sure paths on there, I'd love to do sure path. I think that's a underused piece, right? Especially when we're talking about troubleshooting, right? All right. Well, let me double check the Q&A here if
there's anything new. No, nothing in the chat. So, yeah, the recording will be posted shortly. And thanks everybody for the time today. And keep an eye out for an invite for for a future tech talk maybe on Pete's water leak. So thanks. Bye, Bye.
2023-09-26 10:18
