At ManageEngine IT360, we always strive to ensure that the user must be able to perform complex tasks with little or minimal effort. In this post, I am going to talk about the three different operations you can perform in Dashboard page.

1. Generate different views of your IT business services
2. Create new business service
3. Create customized dashboards for various stakeholders

Now lets get into it one-by-one...

1. Generate Different Views of Your IT Business Services

ManageEngine IT360 offers four distinct views to view your IT business service(s). They are:

   1. Your traditional List View
   2. Tree View
   3. Plasma View and
   4. Global Business View

In your List View mode, you will be able to see the a bit more in-depth about the various business services that you have created. You will view the Availability, Health, Monitor Status, and Today's Availability (in % of uptime) of each business service created within IT360. By clicking on the health or availability icon, you can view the complete Root Cause Analysis (RCA) of the business service.

In Tree View mode, you can view entire list of business service sub-groups and its monitors. In this view, you can view the  availability and health of those monitors. It also displays the list of 'Uncategorized Monitors' which are being monitored through IT360 but not associated with any of the business services. 

With Plasma View mode, as the name suggests, you can display the entire list of monitors in a huge plasma screen. This view will contain the monitor's current status, major alarms created so far along with its business services health & availability.

And Global Business View displays the entire business services combined under a single business view. As before, you can host them in a large plasma screen for display.

2. Create New Business Services

'Add Business Service' is probably the most critical link in this page. This invokes the business service wizard. With the help of this wizard, you can create a new business service and associate critical monitors (network devices, apps, servers, etc) which are crucial for the business service operation. (I will be blogging about this later).

3. Create Different Dashboards for various stakeholders

This is probably one of the most important tasks of all. This operation allows you to create different dashboards for various stakeholders. You can create Network Dashboard for your Network Administrator, Server & Application Dashboard for your IT Administrator and Traffic Dashboard for your System and Network Administrators. In addition, you can also view existing dashboards and business views of various business.

To create a new dashboard click on any of the 'Add' link to create a Network,Server & Applications or Traffic dashboards.

  

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and try these options :-)

When a server goes down or when the response time of a database query exceeds the normal query execution time, any monitoring system in place should perform two actions. One to generate an alarm with relevant information (preferably the RCA - Root Cause Analysis) and secondly to log a ticket into a Service Desk solution. It may additionally execute an SMS action to notify the right technician.

With IT360, you can do that without any external interference. IT360 allows you to automate these actions thereby reducing time taken to troubleshoot the issue. In today's post, we will see how to create threshold, assign action and configure alarms so that the action is properly executed.

Creating Thresholds

Thresholds are values on based on which the alarm is generated. For example, lets say the response time of an Apache server which acts as the web server for a website optimal response time is 1ms. When this value is breached or when the response time value goes higher, the website takes longer to load. Hence, it is critical to ensure that there is a threshold assigned to this web server and is carefully monitored.

In order to assign a threshold for this web server, follow the steps given below:

1. Click on 'Admin' -> 'Servers & Apps' -> 'Configure Alarms'.

2. Select the appropriate web server from the pull down menu 'Alarm Configuration by Monitors'. This will display the list of attributes for which you can assign thresholds for the particular web server. 

3. Click on 'Associate' opposite to 'Response Time'. This will open a pop-up configuration window, wherein you can select the correct threshold corresponding to response time. 

4. Click on 'Save' and 'Close' button to save and close the configuration window. You will now find that the response time for the Apache server is now configured and ready for associating an action.

Create Ticket Action

Now once the threshold is configured, click on 'Action' under 'Servers & Apps'. Click on 'Add New' under 'Log a Ticket' option.

1. Provide a proper name for the ticket.

2. Select the correct Category, Sub Category, Item, Priority, Group and Technician who will be responsible for this web server.

3. IT360 also allows you to insert relevant details into the Ticket content. This enables the technician to view relevant information. This allows the technician to troubleshoot the performance issue quickly.

4. Click on 'Log a Ticket' button to complete the process.

Additionally, you can also execute this action manually by clicking on thisicon. You can also update ticket's content, change category, sub category, etc by clicking on the edit  icon.

Assign Ticket Action

Once the ticket action is created, click on 'Configure Alarms'. Click on the attribute for which you would like the ticket action to be associated with (in our case, the Apache Server's response time). Click on the 'Response Time - Cr > 1500ms'. In the configuration pop-up window, select the check box labeled 'Configure actions at Attribute level'.

Select the appropriate action that needs to be associated with this threshold value. You can create actions and enable them in such a way that you can get alerted when there is an issue, or when the issue clears or when the issue is going to get critical. Once you have chosen the action and clicked the 'Save' & 'Close' button, the configuration is done. The next time when the response time threshold value is breached, the technician is automatically notified. A ticket is logged into the Service Desk solution. In addition to this, you can also associate an SMS action to this threshold thus ensuring the technician receives the information as soon as the incident occurs.

Similarly, you can create an ad-hoc action by clicking on 'New Action' link inside the configuration pop-up window. It will allow you to create the following actions as displayed in the screenshot below.