As discussed in Understanding Changes In EOC 2.0 - The Enterprise Summary View, significant changes have been implemented in the Enterprise Operations Console (EOC 2.0) release. These changes are really based on your feedback, and we work very hard to ensure that from this input, we are advancing the product, yet not taking away features important to our users. In the previous post, we discussed the new approach and changes to the Enterprise Summary View. In this post, I would like to cover additional enhancements and customization options available to you within the Enterprise Maps view.
The Enterprise Maps menu/view, listed second in the Enterprise Console drop-down, is a view much more like a standard Orion Instance summary.
Just a couple resources will be pre-populated out-of-the-box: the "Map" resource and the "Worldwide Map" resource. Like a normal Orion Summary view, Enterprise Maps can be customized or alerted in a number of ways. A quick side note - EOC 2.0 no longer pulls large amounts of data in set intervals from each instance, storing it in a local database. This was described in the WHAT IS THE ENTERPRISE OPERATIONS CONSOLE (EOC) & HOW DOES IT WORK? 2.0!! post. This allows it to be lean and even use SQL Express as a sufficient database (still providing near real-time updates). What this means for customizing views is that some of the resources available through the Core Platform, may not function in the same manner as you expected.
Let me walk you through a few examples from my labs which you may find useful. From the Enterprise Maps view, you now have the opportunity to take advantage of NOC views which can be leveraged to rotate through customized sub-views on a large monitor. In my environment, I created portrayals of a couple of my remote instances and incorporated a global Environment Map of all my infrastructure. The first page you are taken to when clicking on Enterprise Maps is a page dedicated to my Worldwide Environment Map. Here, i simply created a tabular view of the page and dedicated the first page to the Worldwide Map resource.
What is great about this feature is if you are already working with Worldwide Maps at each of your distributed instances, EOC will pull in that data and automatically display the information for you. With little effort you now have a quick global depiction of your nodes, their location, and status. As you zoom in, groups of nodes will expand and you are able to click or hover for quick insight into objects with problems. As an admin user, I can even manually add objects to the map. Placing an object on the map will of course show within the EOC console, but also back on the remote Orion Instance, in which the node is actually managed by.
Next, lets continue down the list of sub-views or tabs and select Data Center 1. This provides a unique view for that particular site I have created.
On this page, and illustrated in the screenshot from Figure 1, you will see a few examples of some of the resources available for EOC users such as the Map, the new All Alerts resource, and custom User Links. Of course there are additional resources that can be useful as well, and I have provided a breakout of those resources in the screenshot from Figure 2.
Figure 1 | Figure 2 |
In EOC 2.0, the Map resource gives you the added benefit of utilizing Network Atlas maps created from the Operations Console, or easily import existing maps from remote instances with a couple clicks. The new All Alerts resource provides very cool enhancements for filtering on severity or searching within the resource itself. You can control which sites you wish to see alerts from, and even acknowledge alerts right from the resource, which will propagate user notes to the remote instance. This was not possible in EOC versions prior to 2.0.
In that same view, I also took advantage of the User Links resource. If you were not already aware, EOC 2.0 now includes PerfStack. For the first time, users now have the ability to perform some actual troubleshooting directly from the Enterprise Operations Console. What makes the EOC version of PerfStack really unique is that you can pull entity data from multiple sites into a single common timeline. For example, when I was building out this view, I wanted to save an example of my Site 1 Orion performance. When adding entities I remembered that the SQL server I was interested using, wasn't a monitored node in my lab. Luckily, it didn't matter. The server was already being monitored by Site 2 and was available for use without having to add it, or monitor it, from Site 1. You can see an example of this below. The entities from PerfStack within EOC will identify which site they are associated to.
Imagine using EOC to acknowledge alerts, and then provide quick insight to the appropriate teams responsible for further investigation by sharing PerfStack data. Custom Charts and Tables can also be quite useful to provide additional data to a dashboard, or create something similar to a Top XX resource. Here is another example view that contains "Critical" interfaces across multiple sites.
This view was created by first using a standard custom property of "critical" for specific interfaces I deemed important across multiple sites. Let me explain this a bit further if you are unfamiliar with this concept. What this means is at each site, I have a custom property built for interfaces with the name Comments. Under this property, i created a drop down of values, one of those values being "critical". I am then able to use that "critical" tag and associate it to the interfaces I believe are the most critical in my environments. Many of you are likely familiar with custom properties and if not, I would certainly suggest becoming familiar as they are certainly a powerful tool when creating custom views, dashboards, reports, and more...
The key to using Custom Charts and Custom Tables in EOC is how you request the data. The first task you must do is choose a selection method. Now choosing Specific Objects (static selection) will not currently work. Remember, EOC does not have the concept of entity data in its own database. It collects data by running SWIS queries to the remote instances. As long as you make your selection method Dynamic Query Builder, EOC 2.0 will be able to send that request to the appropriate sites and retrieve that information. Here is the example from my lab.
You can then add a custom Title and Subtitle, adjust Time Period, choose the Data Series, filter which SolarWinds Sites we would like to report on, and even select a number of records to show. For Example, Top 10. **Note the Time Period selection can be important. EOC is designed for highlighting current performance of remote instances. While you have the ability to adjust the time period to whatever option you wish, having charts or tables pulling large amounts of historical statistics means the queries EOC is performing to gather that data are more complex, therefore taking longer to run and return data. My recommendation would be to keep more of the historical details isolated to reports, and custom resources limited to smaller time frames.
In the previous post, Understanding Changes In EOC 2.0 - The Enterprise Summary View, I mentioned a customized view I created for a for a user that had specific limitations set for their account. This view allowed the user to only see data relevant to their responsibilities in the Enterprise Summary dashboard. Here again is a quick screenshot of that view.
Since we are discussing Custom Charts and Custom Tables, I also wanted to briefly highlight that customized menus can also be generated under the Enterprise Console Dashboard. For example, this user also has a different menu list vs an EOC admin.
Clicking on Site Statistics provides a breakout similar to a Top 10 View.
Hopefully this provides some valuable details around the some of the customization techniques available in EOC 2.0. As always, we are working diligently to improve our products and really provide the functionality that you need. You can view the EOC - What We Are Working On - SEP 2017 post to see what is on the horizon, and I welcome thoughts on improvements you would like to see in the future releases. Stay tuned for more posts in this series perhaps around topics of customizing Tiles, and creating custom accounts.
I recently added Understanding Changes in EOC 2.0 - Creating Global Top XX Resources if you would like to explore additional tips and tricks for further customization techniques.
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