Topology Scan

A topology scanner can be used to set up the topology maps for network devices on the Topology scan.

Architecture of Agent-Based Setup

The agent-based setup consists of two main components at a high level:

• Agent
• AIOps Server

Let us discuss the two major components in further detail.

• AgentAgent is installed on the server that you need to monitor. This unified agent has multiple capabilities that include metric polling, log forwarding, and more capabilities which we will see in the future.The agent has two major components which help in its functioning:
  • .exe files (metric, log, and flow)These are executable files present in an agent that operate separately for each category, namely metric, log, and flow. They are a set of specialized executable files that run on each host monitored using an agent. They collect the relevant metrics from the system on which they run. These files then move the collected data to the agent manager for further processing.
  • Agent ManagerThis is a service running on every host that has an agent installed on it. It is responsible for data collection, storing, and moving the data received from all the exe files to the master AIOps server. At the same time, it is also responsible for communicating the UI-level configuration changes made by the user in the agent to all the executable files.
• AIOps ServerThis is the master server where AIOps is installed. The data collected by the agent are then passed onto the AIOps via the agent manager. This server is the centralized location where you can view and analyze the data from all the hosts monitored by agents.

Agent Overview

In Agent-based Monitoring, you can install a software called “agent” on a device, whether Linux-based or Windows-based so that Motadata AIOps can monitor the device through the agent. The agent installed on the device polls the data and sends it to Motadata AIOps on the main server for monitoring.

It is recommended that the agent be installed on not more than X devices.

Motadata’s Agent-based monitoring establishes communication between the Agent and AIOps Server to start monitoring the device with the agent. Agents are programs that run on remote machines and send the data to the master AIOps server. The Agent constantly monitors the devices and sends the required data at a specific time interval to the AIOps server.

Once the agent is installed on a device, it is registered as an agent-monitored device on the AIOps server. The device must have a unique hostname to be registered for monitoring as AIOps uses the hostname of a device to identify it.

Advantages of Agent-based monitoring with Motadata AIOps:

• Real-time polling

The agent allows you to collect and process real-time metrics from the device as the agent has a polling interval of only 1 second.

• No monitoring downtime

In case the communication link between the agent and the Motadata AIOps is lost, the monitoring data won’t be lost as it will be stored in the agent for up to X hours.

• Better Performance

Monitor the entire infrastructure by eliminating performance issues.

• Easy monitoring setup

You simply need to install an agent in your device to start monitoring the data. No authentication is required in this case.

• Improved customer satisfaction

Quickly access the needed information from the system, contributing to improved customer satisfaction.

• Robust data collection

Even if the IP address of a device is variable, data monitoring won’t stop as the agent is physically installed on the device.

Monitor Rediscovery

Motadata allows you to run rediscovery for monitors to discover specific instances within these monitors for monitoring.

Overview

To explain this further, let us take some examples.

• Suppose you have discovered an ESXi and provisioned as a monitor, you can now discover all the virtual devices within that ESXi using the Rediscover settings.
• Suppose you have discovered a Windows server, you can discover all the processes, services and application in that server using the Rediscover settings.

Navigation

Go to the Main Menu, Select Settings . After that, go to Monitoring .Select Rediscover Settings. The interface to rediscover the instances within a monitor now displayed.

Select the following tab as per the instance you want to discover:

• Application
• Cloud
• Virtualization
• Interface
• Process
• Service
• File/Directory

Here, you can configure a scheduler to run for rediscovery.

The following details for the created schedulers are now available to view under each tabs:

What is a Monitor?

A Monitor is an IT infrastructure component discovered and subsequently provisioned in Motadata for the purpose of monitoring. The monitor facilitates judging the real-time state of the system and generates insights into its performance.

At the application level, a monitor is any entity that is provisioned by a Motadata user after running a discovery. Motadata keeps track of the various performance metrics for an IT infrastructure at the monitor level. The data polling for the metrics is done by Motadata at the monitor level.

The analysis and the insights provided by Motadata via any of its multiple features, be it, Topology, Metric explorer, Log explorer, or Alerts and Policies is done by using the values of the metrics collected at the monitor level.

Let us understand how a monitor is created in Motadata.

1. A user creates a credential profile and a discovery profile and maps the discovery profile to the credential profile.
2. The user then starts a discovery run to discover the devices from a network by executing the discovery profile they created.

3. The user then goes on to provision the discovered devices so that Motadata can keep track of these devices to ‘monitor’ their performance.
4. These provisioned devices that are ‘monitored’ by Motadata are known as Monitors.

How does AIOps help you?

The key capabilities and benefit of AIOps is that it gives DevOps, SRE and ITOps teams the speed and agility they need to detect incidents early in order to ensure the uptime of critical services and the delivery of an optimal customer experience. It’s been hard for these teams to accomplish this due to the evolution of IT infrastructures — moving from static and predictable physical systems to software-defined resources that change and reconfigure on the fly. This demands an equally dynamic technology to deal with these challenges and AIOps is the answer to these challenges.

AIOps Use Cases

AIOps helps IT professionals in three major areas:

Actions on the Dashboard:

Go to Main Menu, Select Dashboard . The default dashboard screen is displayed.

Select on the top right of the screen above the dashboard to display the options available for a dashboard:

• Clone : This option can be used to create another dashboard with the same widgets as the current one.
• Edit : This option can be used to edit the details of your current dashboard.
• Export : This option can be used to take a snapshot of the current dashboard and save it as a PNG format file.
• Delete : This option can be used to delete the current dashboard.

Actions on the Widget:

Select on the top right of any widget to display the options available for a dashboard:

• Edit Widget : This option can be used to edit the widget configuration.
• Clone Widget : This option can be used to create a widget similar to the current one.
• Full Screen : This option can be used to view the widget in full screen.
• Share : This option can be used to share the widget to a specific e-mail address with a customized message.
• Remove Widget : This option can be used to remove the widget from the dashboard.

What is a Dashboard?

The modern IT infrastructure is complex and generates massive sets of data from multiple sources present in the infrastructure. Imagine all of this data at one place and unorganized. Would you be able to use this data effectively?

Would you rather have this data organized and presented you in a way that is not only easy on your eyes, visually stimulating but also presented effectively such that you are able to make efficient business decisions?

Look at the picture below. Even though the data here is presented in an organized manner, you are not able to make sense of the collected data and make business decisions simply based on raw data, whether organized or unorganized.

The data collected from the multiple sources in infrastructure needs to be presented in a manner that’s meaningful, and easy to understand such that it enables efficient decision making while enabling you to learn the state of your system and applications faster and allowing quick troubleshooting.

Now, let’s look at a couple of more images.

This image depicts a dashboard showing server details on widgets effective for visually tracking, analyzing, and displaying key performance metrics that enables you to learn the health status of your infrastructure in just a single glance.

The dashboard in Motadata consists of multiple widgets that can be selected, configured, and positioned on the go to best meet your requirement. The widgets display the data in the form of various graphs such as a pie chart, bar diagram, or sometimes even as a simple list, and so much more. Additional information can also be obtained by hovering the mouse cursor over the diagrams on the widget.

Motadata allows you to create customized dashboards and at the same time also provides multiple pre-configured dashboards to visualize the metrics that are most useful to the users. You can select a monitor from any of the widgets on the dashboard to view details related to that monitor.

Using Motadata dashboards you can:

• Get insights about your infrastructure health with easy-on-the-eye graphical visualizations.
• View and contextualize data at specified times with the zoom-in functionality available in graphs.
• View historical metric data on dashboards by changing the time interval for data as per your requirement.
• Move the widgets on the dashboards by simple drag and drop of the widgets.
• Resize the widgets easily as per your requirement using your mouse.
• Take snapshots of all the widgets in your dashboard to determine the state of your infrastructure at any particular instant.
• View every widget present on the dashboard on a full screen.
• Share widgets with multiple people over e-mail all at once.
• Clone the whole dashboard or clone a widget under the same dashboard.
• Hover over certain elements on the widgets to view more details regarding that particular widget.

Flow Explorer

Flow explorer is a tool that enables you to graphically visualize the flow data for all the devices sending flow to Motadata AIOps server. Flow explorer provides consistent visibility into your network allowing you to judge essential infrastructural requirements, make business-driven decisions, and ensure efficient and cost-effective operations based on the network flow data presented to you.

Navigation

Go to Menu, Select Flow Explorer . After that, Select Explorer. The Flow Explorer tool is now displayed.

How to use Flow explorer?

Let us consider an example to understand how to use the flow explorer.

Scenario

We have a flow forwarder device, 10.20.40.97 that sends flow details to the Motadata console. This device stores the flow details of source IPs in the range 192.168.0.1 – 192.168.0.5. These devices communicate with a wide range of destination IPs. They communicate via destination port 443 using the communication protocol TCP.

Now, let us see how we can visualize this information in flow explorer.

Steps to use Flow Explorer

Select the button to start.

A pop-up asking to enter the filter inputs is displayed. We then go ahead and enter the inputs as per our example:

1. From the Select Monitor dropdown, select all the forwarder devices that sends the flow details to the Motadata AIOps server.

   

2. From the Select Source option, select source.ip to display the IPs of all the source devices whose flow data is available in the forwarder device. As we already know, in our case, the source IPs are in the range of 192.168.0.1 – 192.168.0.5. There are many other options available except source.ip which you can use to create the filter as per your requirement.

   

3. From the Select Destination option, select destination.ip and destination.port to display the IPs and destination ports of all the destinations which are communicating with our source devices. There are many other options available besides destination.ip and destination.port that you can use to create the filter as per your requirements.

   

4. From the Select Other option, select protocol to display the protocol which the source and destination use to communicate with one another. There are many other options besides protocol that you can use to create the filter as per your requirement.

   

5. From the Select Metric option, select packets to display the packets being sent from source to destination. There are many other options except packets that you can use to create the filter as per your requirement.

   

Select Apply Filter to create the Sankey chart representation of the flow data based on the inputs you selected.

Select Cancel if you do not wish to create the Sankey chart representation.

The Sankey chart representation in this case will be as follows:

You can also view the list of values for all the fields you selected to create the diagram. Each record in this list represents a link between the source and the destination in the diagram you created.

This list can be viewed below the Sankey diagram as seen in the following picture.

Actions available on the Flow Explorer

• Refresh the flow data Select to refresh the flow data.
• Take a screenshot of the dashboard Select to take a screenshot of the dashboard in its current state.
• Change the time period of the flow data You can change the time period for which flow data is being shown on the flow explorer. Click present just above the diagram to do so.
• Change the filter Select to change the fields you selected for creating the Sankey diagram initially.
• Change the chart type You can change the graph used to represent the flow data. The Sankey chart is selected by default. Click on the dropdown Select Chart Type and select the chart as per your requirement.
• Change the order of the nodes You can change the order of the nodes in the diagram to view the diagram as per your requirement. You can drag and drop the fields from the toolbar on the right side of the screen and rearrange them in the order you need.

How to send flow data for a device to the Flow explorer?

In order to view flow data of a device in flow explorer, the device must be configured to push the data to Motadata AIOps server. If you do not configure your device to send data, the Flow explorer is not able to populate the relevant flow data.

The device forwarding the flow data must be configured to send the data to port 2055 of your Motadata console.

Types of Flow supported in Motadata

• sFlow
• jFlow
• NetFlow