I'm constantly in a state of frustration over how my APM and NPM data is organized. I need to be able to present Orion data from an application or business service viewpoint. The way I've approached it so far is to create custom properties attached to nodes to identify what servers belong to what application. The two custom properties I used for this are Application and Device_Role. I've then created APM templates and assigned them to the servers, and filtered them in the All Applications tree by Application, Device Role, Server Name, like so:
This has made it fairly easy to see and browse all the apps configured from an overall view. The problem arises when I try to narrow down what I want to look at. As far as I can tell there should be two ways to accomplish this, Views and Groups. Neither fully offer the ability to dynamically filter by custom property. So I can't see a rollup of a single business service. I can create a group filtering by custom properties but it will only show node info. To include app info I would have to select each monitor individually. With nearly 4000 nodes and 3200 application monitors I can't realistically configure everything manually and then keep up with changes afterward. I haven't figured out how to create a view to produce the right info at all. I tried creating a group with a dynamic query for the application node custom property, then create an APM view filtering by that group, but that doesn't work at all, it just ends up showing everything.
I really need a way to configure a single page that dynamically selects what resources to display based off custom properties and can display NPM and APM resources on the same page. If someone asks me, "Has anything happened on Sharepoint recently?" I need to be able to go to a single page that has all the data for Sharepoint, see that everything's up right now, see that there was a service monitored by APM which had been down for 15 minutes earlier that day, one of the servers was rebooted last night, and see that disk space on one of the drives is nearly full. All the data is in the Orion database but as far as I know the web UI is too limited to allow you to do this.
How is everyone else organizing data in Orion? There's got to be a better way.
