Interacting with the Dashboards

You can enhance your interaction with the dashboard using elements such as tooltips, dwells, and popups. Different types of smaller views provide additional detail about an element in a view. Examples of these views are:

  • A tooltip element describes what it represents when you hold the cursor over a status icon. A tooltip also appears when you hover the cursor over a line in a chart.
  • A dwell displays additional information about the item when you hold your cursor over a line in a table.
  • A popup displays additional information and options if you click a line in a table.

Tooltips and dwells disappear when you move the mouse, but a popup remains open until you close it by clicking outside it or clicking the close icon in the corner. You can also maximize some popups by clicking the maximize icon in the upper right corner.

This section, covers the following key areas:

Drop down lists are views that change the context of other views, such as those in the same container view. When you select an item from a dropdown list, the view is refreshed with new data. For example, a view may contain a dropdown list of metrics, a chart, and a table. Selecting a different metric changes the context of the page, and the chart and table are updated accordingly. A dropdown displays a list of single options. A tree expands to display a hierarchy of options. Both can have the same effect on the context.

Common Views

Foglight makes use of common views in most of the standard dashboards. Using common views in dashboards is an effective way to enable and create easy workflows. Examples of views used in many of the dashboards include the Alarm List and the Host Summary.

Alarm List

The Alarm List view displays a summary of alarms. This view allows you to examine alarms from different perspectives by choosing one of the following tabs:

Expand nodes in these tabs and click on details to drill down and further investigate aspects of the alarms in your system. For additional information the Alarm List view, refer to the following topics:

Error Instance(s)

An error instance is any object in your environment that is the source of an alarm. Foglight lists each error instance’s health, number of alarms, and health history in the Error Instance(s) tab.

You can isolate issues related to systems more easily by showing alarms organized by the originating host. Foglight lists each host’s health, number of alarms, and health history in the Related Host(s) tab.

You can understand which agents are causing alarms to fire by showing alarms organized by the agent that collected the data. Foglight lists each agent’s health, number of alarms, and health history in the Related Agents(s) tab.

Hiding Columns

You can hide any of the columns in the Alarms List view. To hide columns:

  1. Click the Edit icon above the table. A popup displays a list of the columns in the table.
  2. Clear the check boxes for the columns you want to hide and click Apply.

The columns are removed from the table.

Alarm Chaining

An alarm chain is a series of consecutive non-normal alarm states for the same alarm event. For example, the CPU utilization on a specific machine keeps changing values that trigger a non-normal state.

The following chain describes the alarm from 10:55 until 11:30 (when it becomes normal again): 10:55 AM – Normal 11:00 AM – Warning 11:05 AM – Critical 11:15 AM – Fatal 11:20 AM – Warning 11:25 AM – Critical 11:30 AM – Normal

Using the Alarm Details dialog box, you can select either the Acknowledge or Acknowledge Until Normal option for a current alarm if you want the alarm to remain acknowledged until it reaches a normal state. For example, if you select the Acknowledge until Normal option at 11:00 AM, the alarm stays acknowledged until 11:30 AM. In contrast, if you select the Acknowledge option at 11:00 AM, the alarm (chain) would be “Unacknowledged” again at 11:05 AM when the severity has changed.

Alarm chains can only be seen in the Alarm Details dialog box. For more information about this dialog box, refer to Viewing Alarm Details.

Historical Alarm Occurrences

From the Alarm Details dialog box, you can drill down to a view that shows historic occurrences of an alarm. For example, if you are looking at the CPU utilization alarm for host1, you can go to a view that shows historic occurrences of that alarm (CPU utilization) on the same object (host1).

To view historical alarm occurrences for an object:

  1. On the Alarms dashboard, drill down to an alarm and click the alarm to display the Alarm Details dialog box.
  2. On the Alarm Details dialog box, click Find Historic Occurrences

This view consists of the following main components:

  • Time range menu: provides a quick way to change the current time range. Select an option in this menu to change the current time range to the selected time period and updates the entire view. If there is no alarm occurrence in the selected time period, nothing will be shown in the graph and in the table.
  • Alarm historical occurrences table: lists alarm occurrences in the current time range. The dwell and popup on each row show the alarm severity transitions of the alarm occurrence in that row. The Notes column shows the number of notes added to each alarm occurrence. Details of these notes are available through the dwell and popup.
  • A set of alarm occurrence controls: these controls show “» No more occurrences” if there are no occurrences outside of the current time range. If there is a “« Get more” control on the left, this indicates alarm occurrences prior to the current time range. Hover over this control to view the creation time of the most recent occurrence before the current time range. Click on this control to display this alarm occurrence into the table and at the same time adjust the current time range to include this occurrence. The “» Get more” control works the same way for alarm occurrences after the current time range.

Alarm Notes

Alarm notes provide you with a handy way to record information about an alarm for all other users to view. For example, if you are managing alarms during an installation of Foglight and if an urgent alarm comes up, you can add a note to the alarm that you are checking if the back-up process may be causing the problem. The note, along with a username stamp and a timestamp, are attached to the alarm.

There are two ways to add notes from the Alarm Details dialog box, by using either the:

  • History tab- The Notes icon in the Alarm History table is for maintaining notes attached to a particular alarm in the history table. Clicking the Notes icon, takes you to the Alarm Notes dialog box.
  • All Notes tab- New notes are automatically attached to the most recent alarm in the alarm history.

Creating an Alarm Note

Alarm notes consist of free-form, non-localizable text, a user name, and a timestamp.

To create an alarm note:

  1. From the Alarm Details dialog box you can either:
    • Click the History tab and then click on the Notes icon. The Alarm Notes popup appears. Click Add.
    • Click on the All Notes tab and then click New.
  2. In the Add Note dialog box, type a description of the note.
  3. Click Add. The description is added to the Alarm Notes dialog box.

Editing an Alarm Note

Only the creator of the note can edit the note.

To edit an alarm note:

  1. From the Alarm Details dialog box, you can either:
    • Click the History tab, and then click the Notes icon. The Alarm Notes dialog box appears.
    • Click the All Notes tab, go to step 2.
  2. Click the Edit icon.
  3. In the Edit Note dialog, change the description of the note.
  4. Click Submit.

The description of the note changes to the modified text.


Deleting an Alarm Note

Only the creator of the note can delete the note.

To delete an alarm note:

  1. From the Alarm Details dialog box you can either:
    • Click the History tab, and then click the Notes icon. The Alarm Notes dialog box appears.
    • Click the All Notes tab, go to step 2.
  2. In the Alarm Notes dialog box, select the check box of the note(s) you want to delete.
  3. Click Delete. The selected notes are removed.

Host Summary

Click or hover the mouse over the name of a physical host to view a host summary popup or dwell.

A diagnostic time range is displayed at the top of the summary. This time range indicates the period during which the alarm was fired. It is usually in the past and is sometimes different from the time range that appears on a dashboard.

For example, if the alarm occurred on Monday May 11th during a particular time range, while the date displayed on the dashboard is Tuesday May 12th. Click on items in the popup to drill down for more information about the host, its alarms, and its performance. Drilling down from the popup retains the time range during which the alarm occurred. To go back to the monitoring time range you last used, “unfreeze” the range by following the procedures in Freezing a Time Range.