1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:10,000 Another item to talk to first is the idea of performance. 2 00:00:10,000 --> 00:00:12,000 So we saw before some of those profiles. 3 00:00:12,000 --> 00:00:15,000 So it's one thing to get Nagios to do, 4 00:00:15,000 --> 00:00:20,000 to use plugins to be checking things like those buffer cache shits. 5 00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:22,000 Here in the performance configuration, 6 00:00:22,000 --> 00:00:25,000 this is where groundwork is as part of that profile, 7 00:00:25,000 --> 00:00:30,000 giving you what you need to know to build an RRD from an advanced Nagios check. 8 00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:35,000 And an RRD is a way of essentially keeping track of historical information, right? 9 00:00:35,000 --> 00:00:41,000 And then one would hope making charts from it after a while to keep up with historical performance. 10 00:00:41,000 --> 00:00:42,000 Correct. 11 00:00:42,000 --> 00:00:47,000 It's an efficient way to store time series data without eating up lots of disk space. 12 00:00:47,000 --> 00:00:48,000 Right. 13 00:00:48,000 --> 00:00:51,000 So if I'm checking buffer cache hits every five minutes, 14 00:00:51,000 --> 00:00:54,000 that's X number of checks a day, number of weeks, 15 00:00:54,000 --> 00:00:56,000 that's a lot of rows for the database. 16 00:00:56,000 --> 00:00:57,000 Absolutely. 17 00:00:57,000 --> 00:01:01,000 You know, a nice thing about RRD is I can use a fixed file size 18 00:01:01,000 --> 00:01:04,000 and just update those values but still be able to produce a graph. 19 00:01:04,000 --> 00:01:07,000 Let's actually view that as an example. 20 00:01:10,000 --> 00:01:15,000 So now I'll come in and I'll ask, well, where am I running that check? 21 00:01:15,000 --> 00:01:17,000 Here's that service check. 22 00:01:17,000 --> 00:01:21,000 And here I can see I've got a couple of hosts that I'm getting those measurements. 23 00:01:21,000 --> 00:01:24,000 I'm going to add those two hosts to the view. 24 00:01:24,000 --> 00:01:28,000 And at first glance, let's just do an expanded view. 25 00:01:28,000 --> 00:01:33,000 So let's see over the last one day which machine is running different. 26 00:01:33,000 --> 00:01:37,000 So you'll see I have a little outage in the lab there. 27 00:01:37,000 --> 00:01:38,000 Right. 28 00:01:38,000 --> 00:01:41,000 But over the last day there's that value. 29 00:01:41,000 --> 00:01:51,000 Now for capacity planning, I can now also take those two graphs and I'm going to combine them now. 30 00:01:51,000 --> 00:01:55,000 So now I can see which ones are running hotter than the other. 31 00:01:55,000 --> 00:02:00,000 But let's add some other values for capacity planning. 32 00:02:00,000 --> 00:02:02,000 I can come back to this application. 33 00:02:02,000 --> 00:02:08,000 And again, because I've used the groundwork profiles, I didn't have to spend a lot of time thinking about 34 00:02:08,000 --> 00:02:14,000 what checks should I run, what thresholds they should be, and how do I build the URRGs. 35 00:02:14,000 --> 00:02:18,000 I'm going to add these two. 36 00:02:18,000 --> 00:02:21,000 So that adds disk on those same hosts. 37 00:02:21,000 --> 00:02:24,000 Let's also add memory to that. 38 00:02:24,000 --> 00:02:28,000 I'll grab those two hosts. 39 00:02:28,000 --> 00:02:33,000 And now we'll look at that same collapsed view, or consolidated view. 40 00:02:33,000 --> 00:02:36,000 And now I can get some interesting correlations. 41 00:02:36,000 --> 00:02:37,000 All right. 42 00:02:37,000 --> 00:02:38,000 So disk space. 43 00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:39,000 Okay. 44 00:02:39,000 --> 00:02:41,000 One is using 80% of disk. 45 00:02:41,000 --> 00:02:42,000 The other is using 50. 46 00:02:42,000 --> 00:02:47,000 But if I'm on the hunt for physical servers that I want to virtualize, 47 00:02:47,000 --> 00:02:53,000 well here I can see that for the most part these servers are using well under half their CPU and memory. 48 00:02:53,000 --> 00:02:57,000 As I recall, in 5.2 you added BERT integration, right? 49 00:02:57,000 --> 00:03:01,000 And is that something else or is that what we're seeing here? 50 00:03:01,000 --> 00:03:05,000 So these are actually just the RRDs that we're looking at. 51 00:03:05,000 --> 00:03:08,000 Now, BERT extends some reporting capabilities. 52 00:03:08,000 --> 00:03:15,000 And we have in 5.2 created the ability to put data into the database as well as into the RRDs. 53 00:03:16,000 --> 00:03:19,000 And the value there is things like top 10 reports. 54 00:03:19,000 --> 00:03:20,000 Right. 55 00:03:20,000 --> 00:03:26,000 If I have all of my disk space inside of RRDs and I want to see well who's using the most disk space, 56 00:03:26,000 --> 00:03:29,000 that's a tough thing to get out of an RRD. 57 00:03:29,000 --> 00:03:32,000 Let's go ahead and pull an example report based on a host group. 58 00:03:32,000 --> 00:03:36,000 I'm going to choose my WinXP host group for a second. 59 00:03:36,000 --> 00:03:40,000 And let's see what performance data we have available. 60 00:03:40,000 --> 00:03:43,000 Now, with some labeling, you can make this a little clearer. 61 00:03:43,000 --> 00:03:45,000 But here's the C drive that we're checking. 62 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:52,000 And now we want to just produce a report over time for that particular group of hosts and that particular measurement. 63 00:03:52,000 --> 00:04:05,000 So there's sort of a distinction between your more up to the minute or up to the whatever time interval sort of performance graphing and reporting versus the data warehousing kind of reports that you would do. 64 00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:10,000 The data warehousing ones that take sort of a higher level view of all of your infrastructure. 65 00:04:10,000 --> 00:04:13,000 Yeah, one is more for, again, analysis. 66 00:04:13,000 --> 00:04:16,000 And then the graphing is more for response. 67 00:04:16,000 --> 00:04:17,000 Right, right. 68 00:04:17,000 --> 00:04:21,000 So it gets that warning that disk is at 81% use. 69 00:04:21,000 --> 00:04:24,000 They want to see, well, when did this thing start to run out of space? 70 00:04:24,000 --> 00:04:27,000 I just need to see visually a trend. 71 00:04:27,000 --> 00:04:28,000 Right. 72 00:04:28,000 --> 00:04:37,000 As to now the guy who needs to go justify the new SAN upgrade, he needs to be able to pull a report that says, well, here's where we're using it. 73 00:04:37,000 --> 00:04:40,000 And that lends itself more toward the performance reports. 74 00:04:40,000 --> 00:04:47,000 So here I've produced a quick report that's summarizing that all of the hosts are between 80 and 81% used. 75 00:04:47,000 --> 00:04:49,000 In fact, it's just the one host. 76 00:04:49,000 --> 00:05:01,000 And now if I wanted to go further to get a further drill down on that particular host, the BERT reports allow me to feed the links into the data itself. 77 00:05:01,000 --> 00:05:04,000 So a drill down now, I'm looking at that specific host. 78 00:05:04,000 --> 00:05:08,000 My trend would be there over time, minimum, maximum. 79 00:05:08,000 --> 00:05:18,000 And then if I wanted to export this, upgrades in 5.2 to the BERT engine allow us to now give you Word or PowerPoint or Excel even as an expert. 80 00:05:18,000 --> 00:05:27,000 Now as another example again, so availability reports, some other extensions in working with customers both for host group availability. 81 00:05:27,000 --> 00:05:37,000 So again, with some of those checks that we were looking at before, if we wanted to get availability stats for, say, core routers. 82 00:05:37,000 --> 00:05:45,000 You can define, if you have an SLA in place, what constitutes whether or not hosts are up or down. 83 00:05:45,000 --> 00:05:47,000 And that's always the trickiest thing with an SLA. 84 00:05:47,000 --> 00:05:56,000 Well, if you're up 99.9% of the time, well, is that the whole day or is that minus the scheduled downtime? 85 00:05:56,000 --> 00:05:56,000 Right. 86 00:05:56,000 --> 00:05:58,000 Because you have to be able to schedule things for downtime. 87 00:05:58,000 --> 00:06:02,000 You can't possibly be up, you know, 5.9 that easily. 88 00:06:02,000 --> 00:06:11,000 So here out of the box we were able to hone in to see about, as far as the services the core routers were running, we had some warning time that was unscheduled. 89 00:06:11,000 --> 00:06:17,000 And then when I want to drill down further, the hosts themselves were all up. 90 00:06:17,000 --> 00:06:28,000 So if the SLA wants to say, hey, the routers can be down for an hour a month, you can actually have that report come through to say, yep, we met the uptime guarantees. 91 00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:29,000 Right. 92 00:06:29,000 --> 00:06:37,000 And then if I want to drill further into it, I'm able to see some other types of the other outputs broken down for me. 93 00:06:37,000 --> 00:06:40,000 So 20% service availability versus host availability. 94 00:06:40,000 --> 00:06:42,000 Hosts are all up 100%. 95 00:06:42,000 --> 00:06:44,000 Services were up 80%. 96 00:06:44,000 --> 00:06:48,000 The last thing is to just speak to the dashboards. 97 00:06:48,000 --> 00:07:05,000 So as I have, again, users that need to view a subset of the environment, the idea behind dashboards is that you can collect together specific things that can either help you evaluate current status or you want them to help you troubleshoot. 98 00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:08,000 So here's an example of a default dashboard. 99 00:07:08,000 --> 00:07:11,000 And you'll see I've got no troubled hosts. 100 00:07:11,000 --> 00:07:12,000 I've got some services. 101 00:07:12,000 --> 00:07:14,000 I can drill down into any one of them. 102 00:07:14,000 --> 00:07:15,000 Mm-hmm. 103 00:07:15,000 --> 00:07:23,000 Or if I wanted to get into a breakdown to see, well, who's scheduled to be down and so forth, I have that, as well as the console below. 104 00:07:23,000 --> 00:07:26,000 So any of the recent events that have come through can be visible. 105 00:07:26,000 --> 00:07:35,000 And is this another thing, like the reports we're talking about, where you can set up a user to be able to just come in and look at this only if they want sort of a self-service view on things? 106 00:07:35,000 --> 00:07:38,000 Or is it more intended for the operators to use this? 107 00:07:38,000 --> 00:07:42,000 Well, it's more intended where role-based is needed. 108 00:07:42,000 --> 00:07:46,000 So we have developers are going to be responding to notifications. 109 00:07:46,000 --> 00:07:50,000 I only want the developers to see their web apps and databases. 110 00:07:50,000 --> 00:07:57,000 Rather than give them the full status view, I can give them a custom dashboard that can relate different components for them. 111 00:07:57,000 --> 00:08:01,000 In contrast, actually for this presentation, I started to build an executive dashboard. 112 00:08:01,000 --> 00:08:10,000 And here's an example where I'm collecting together specific items as well as livening it up with a background. 113 00:08:10,000 --> 00:08:16,000 So here's a background image that in the dashboard configuration, I'll show you how that works. 114 00:08:16,000 --> 00:08:23,000 But I'm collecting together a high-level roll-up along with some critical host groups and then maybe some services. 115 00:08:23,000 --> 00:08:24,000 Right. 116 00:08:24,000 --> 00:08:25,000 Where I haven't defined any. 117 00:08:25,000 --> 00:08:32,000 So if suddenly I'm logging in because I just got an alert, I want to know, well, what's the status of the critical host groups? 118 00:08:32,000 --> 00:08:35,000 Well, if I'm a network guy, I can see on my dashboard all my stuff is green. 119 00:08:35,000 --> 00:08:38,000 I don't necessarily pay much time to it. 120 00:08:38,000 --> 00:08:43,000 But if I wasn't, if I was a server guy and I now needed to see, well, why is that disk yellow? 121 00:08:43,000 --> 00:08:45,000 With a drill down, I can get in there. 122 00:08:45,000 --> 00:08:48,000 Now, again, these, again, it's very easy to customize. 123 00:08:48,000 --> 00:08:50,000 Sometimes people hear, oh, I'm going to customize open source. 124 00:08:50,000 --> 00:08:52,000 It's really pretty easy. 125 00:08:52,000 --> 00:08:55,000 So let's, for example, let me go back to my executive dashboard. 126 00:08:55,000 --> 00:08:58,000 And I started to open. 127 00:08:58,000 --> 00:09:05,000 I can set up roles to assign this dashboard to everyone or just to a specific user or group. 128 00:09:05,000 --> 00:09:09,000 So here I am in the dashboard configuration. 129 00:09:09,000 --> 00:09:12,000 And I started to have some services be created. 130 00:09:12,000 --> 00:09:16,000 So the widget list here is where I can choose elements to add to the dashboard. 131 00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:20,000 In the case of this service list, I'm just going to remove this. 132 00:09:20,000 --> 00:09:22,000 And I'm going to add that widget back in. 133 00:09:22,000 --> 00:09:24,000 So I right clicked on the service list there. 134 00:09:24,000 --> 00:09:28,000 And I said I wanted to delete that particular dashboard component. 135 00:09:28,000 --> 00:09:39,000 And while it loads, Michael, the other thing I would say is the dashboard builder, we can also embed things that are not groundwork in here. 136 00:09:39,000 --> 00:09:47,000 So if you wanted to have, let's say, a part of your dashboard be a page that points to, like, Google Analytics, for example, you can do that too. 137 00:09:47,000 --> 00:09:51,000 Oh, right, or maybe your help box inbox or something. 138 00:09:51,000 --> 00:09:53,000 Yeah, or Jira or something like that. 139 00:09:53,000 --> 00:09:54,000 Right. 140 00:09:54,000 --> 00:09:58,000 That's that external URL widget that David was mentioning. 141 00:09:58,000 --> 00:10:04,000 So you'll see here when you add that by default, it's actually loading in the groundwork support site. 142 00:10:04,000 --> 00:10:14,000 And then for my service list, again, as part of 5.2, we added some additional ease of use type of functionality on the dashboards. 143 00:10:14,000 --> 00:10:19,000 One particular thing to note is the ability to use database lookups when I'm configuring. 144 00:10:19,000 --> 00:10:23,000 So now let's configure this for the services that I want to see. 145 00:10:23,000 --> 00:10:27,000 If I want to specify a host, let's say it's something on that host we just added. 146 00:10:27,000 --> 00:10:31,000 So that CentOS machine is running a service that I want to monitor. 147 00:10:31,000 --> 00:10:37,000 And we actually want to see that that particular web check is available. 148 00:10:37,000 --> 00:10:39,000 So I click CentOS. 149 00:10:39,000 --> 00:10:42,000 I choose the HTTP live service check. 150 00:10:42,000 --> 00:10:46,000 And then I choose add service into the widget. 151 00:10:46,000 --> 00:10:49,000 And then I can click OK. 152 00:10:49,000 --> 00:10:52,000 And notice that that shows up right away with the current state. 153 00:10:52,000 --> 00:10:56,000 When I've done my changes to the dashboard, again, here's where I would make it global. 154 00:10:56,000 --> 00:11:07,000 Or if I wanted to just set it up to a specific user or a role, I can put permissions on it that say that these users are allowed to read or write. 155 00:11:07,000 --> 00:11:13,000 And again, avoid somebody having too much privilege in the system. 156 00:11:13,000 --> 00:11:15,000 Being overprivileged burdened. 157 00:11:15,000 --> 00:11:17,000 They don't want that. 158 00:11:17,000 --> 00:11:18,000 Yeah. 159 00:11:18,000 --> 00:11:21,000 And you know that a little knowledge can be dangerous. 160 00:11:21,000 --> 00:11:22,000 That's right. 161 00:11:22,000 --> 00:11:29,000 So as part of our, again, part of the upgrade to the event console, we also did some work under the hood. 162 00:11:29,000 --> 00:11:34,000 Because we had a need for a lot of customers that wanted integrations with service desk applications. 163 00:11:34,000 --> 00:11:35,000 Things like Remedy. 164 00:11:35,000 --> 00:11:45,000 So we can now do things like take external actions through an API to maybe not just acknowledge all of these problems in Nagios or open all of these log messages. 165 00:11:45,000 --> 00:11:52,000 But actually file a communication, say, to a service desk to automatically open tickets or automatically close tickets. 166 00:11:52,000 --> 00:11:53,000 Right. 167 00:11:53,000 --> 00:11:54,000 So you don't have to switch context to do that. 168 00:11:54,000 --> 00:11:56,000 It's just integrated into the tool here. 169 00:11:56,000 --> 00:11:57,000 It is. 170 00:11:57,000 --> 00:12:08,000 And for Groundwork to maintain some customizations going forward, it was necessary for us to put an API somewhere so that we wouldn't have a series of kind of runoff type of situations. 171 00:12:08,000 --> 00:12:09,000 Right. 172 00:12:09,000 --> 00:12:11,000 So previously we would implement things with scripts. 173 00:12:11,000 --> 00:12:21,000 Now we can write things like to an API where actions taken from the screens can be handled in more of an enterprise fashion. 174 00:12:21,000 --> 00:12:22,000 Right. 175 00:12:22,000 --> 00:12:23,000 That makes sense. 176 00:12:23,000 --> 00:12:29,000 I think that was a nice overview of Groundwork itself and the new features in 5.2. 177 00:12:29,000 --> 00:12:39,000 And I would assume one could just go to your Groundwork website to try it out and see how it works for themselves. 178 00:12:39,000 --> 00:12:40,000 Yeah. 179 00:12:40,000 --> 00:12:41,000 So there's a couple options. 180 00:12:41,000 --> 00:12:48,000 You can sign up on our website for a product tour and you can either take care of it. 181 00:12:48,000 --> 00:12:53,000 There's one option to take care of a very brief sort of a quick time tour. 182 00:12:53,000 --> 00:12:58,000 Or you can sign up for a demo which is going to be along the lines and it might even be Rich doing it. 183 00:12:58,000 --> 00:13:01,000 It will custom tailor it to your particular needs. 184 00:13:01,000 --> 00:13:08,000 And then of course we have the Groundwork Monitor Community Edition which you can download as well and play with it yourself. 185 00:13:08,000 --> 00:13:11,000 That one's free to use perpetually if I remember right. 186 00:13:11,000 --> 00:13:12,000 That's correct. 187 00:13:12,000 --> 00:13:17,000 I mean that's the whole classic divide between a community and an enterprise edition or a pro edition. 188 00:13:17,000 --> 00:13:23,000 The second one being one that you pay for and have support for and usually have extended features with. 189 00:13:23,000 --> 00:13:24,000 Right. 190 00:13:24,000 --> 00:13:25,000 Yeah. 191 00:13:25,000 --> 00:13:28,000 So in our particular case we have the community edition which is the free one and it's community supported. 192 00:13:28,000 --> 00:13:32,000 And then we have the professional and enterprise which are the paid subscription versions. 193 00:13:32,000 --> 00:13:33,000 Right. 194 00:13:33,000 --> 00:13:34,000 That makes sense. 195 00:13:34,000 --> 00:13:35,000 Well great. 196 00:13:35,000 --> 00:13:37,000 Well thanks to both of you for taking the time to show us this. 197 00:13:37,000 --> 00:13:44,000 It's always exciting to actually see a demo to match up with all the stuff we hear about different stacks and pieces of software. 198 00:13:44,000 --> 00:13:45,000 So I appreciate it.