This is in continuation of Part 1 discussed in this blog. In this section, I shall take you through the various features of Dashboards as offered in IT360 and how to use them.
One major need that you come across in managing the day to day operations of your IT [from IT Infrastructure Management tools] is to create custom dashboards specific to the following roles in your IT Department:
- Network Dashboards and Traffic Dashboards for your Network Administrators
- System Dashboards for your System Administrators
- Applications Dashboards for your Application Administrators
- Server Dashboards for your Server Administrators
- Dashboards for IT Managers, and CXOs
And, the most important aspect of IT360 dashboards are its widgets and the possibilities / choices that it offers. IT360 offers a set of default dashboards with widgets:
- Infrastructure Snapshot – a collection of monitored elements based on their type – Switches or routers or DBs or VMWare and so on.
- Business Services – a collection of monitored elements that has an impact on a particular aspect of your business, say a mail service, a CRM service, etc..
- Servers dashboards
- Applications dashboards
- Network devices dashboards
- Individual monitored elements like a given server, or a network device or an application
- Parameter specific dashboards / widgets like CPU Utilization, Disk Utilization, etc..
In addition, you may create as many dashboards as you may want, specify the number of widget columns [from a 1 column Dashboard up to a 4 column dashboard] and customize their % widths.
The widgets inside a dashboard can be repositioned at will [design time and run / real time] in the UI depending on the importance, its data size, criticality, changing need, etc..
You can select the performance widgets of your choice from the list for a given dashboard. There are about 15 widgets that are made available by default. You can add any number of the above 15 widgets, any number of times to a Dashboard.
What needs to be shown in these widgets is also customizable. Some options available are detailed below [Top N monitors widget, taken for example]:
- You may filter the data by Monitor Type
- Choose the Primary Metric to be displayed
- Choose to show the Top 5 / 10 / 25 / 50 / All data,etc.
- Display mode: Line Graph or Bar Chart or Inline % Bar or a Tabular Data
- Select Time Period ranging from Last 24 Hours to a Quarter
- Display Alarm status for the selected metric, if required
- Also display additional / related metric
You now have a fair idea of what dashboards mean in the context of IT360.
If you would like to get a first-hand feel of the same please refer to the following [demo] link:
You may also want a first-hand experience of the same and may want to evaluate. If yes, you can download a trial version from the following link:
http://www.manageengine.com/it360/download.html
K.Lakshmi Shankar
