This section covers the _GroundWork Monitor_ *Reports* page which provides various monitoring and management reports including *BIRT Report Viewer* which include Availability, Event, Performance and Status reports, *Performance View* which displays graphs of any and all performance data collected by the system, Insight Reports including *Alerts*, *Notifications*, and *Outages*, and *SLA Reports* that enable you to configure SLA's and run reports based on measured items. *Custom Reports* are also discussed, these enable you to create, modify, generate, and distribute custom monitoring reports using the _BIRT Report Designer_ tool.
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Immediately following an installation, there will not be any data for the _GroundWork Availability Reports_. The data for these reports are generated by the dashboard_data_load.pl and dashboard_avail_load.pl scripts which are normally run once a day, at night, as a cron job. This is the expected behavior. These scripts can be run manually to generate data earlier if required.
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GroundWork Reports include a set of predefined service level reports available for immediate report generation and visibility into IT service levels. These standard availability and status reports include _Availability, Event, Performance,_ and _Status_ type reports and are viewable in GroundWork Monitor through the integrated BIRT Report Viewer.
* *Availability Reports* include Host Availability, Host Group Availability, Host State Transitions, and Service State Transitions reports.
* *Event Reports* include Event History and the Event History Overview reports.
* Enterprise *Performance Reports* include Host, Host Group, Host Group Top Five, Host Multi Variable, and Host Group Multi Variable. These reports are based on aggregated performance statistics collected on a daily basis in the Foundation database. In the default configuration, performance data is consolidated daily and stored for one year. The nightly data consolidation process calculates the minimum, maximum and average value for the day; the underlying measurements are not kept. By default in 5.2 and later the process_service_perfdata_file (file based performance handling) posts performance data to Foundation (same time as writing the RRD file). As long as performance counters are defined for checks the data will be available for EPR reports.
* *Status Reports* include Host Groups Status, and Host Status reports. The Host Group Status report displays high level information on the current status of Hosts and Services for all Host Groups or a specified Host Group. The Host Status Report provides information on the current status of a specified Host and all Services for that Host.
h4. 2.0 Performance View
The Performance View application displays graphs of any and all performance data collected by the system. Performance trend reports allow you to create groups of hosts or services that you want to see in GroundWork performance reports. Any combination of performance graphs can be consolidated and saved as reports for repeated viewing with constant updated data. This application extremely flexible in its ability to combine multiple data sets across multiple hosts. In essence, any numerical data returned by any plugin in the system can be graphed in combination with any other like data.
GroundWork Monitor provides graphing and reporting for performance over time so you can watch trends in order to take early corrective action by making visual correlations across metrics from multiple services. It also helps in watching capacity trends for planning purposes. Performance View enables you to generate performance graphs from the monitoring data gathered (e.g. disk space usage, processor load, CPU utilization, Memory utilization, Bandwidth utilization, I/O Stats.etc.). It supports storage, analysis and display of performance data-in both graphical and tabular formats.
The power of this interface to compare performance of systems and applications is obvious. For example, historical views of CPU vs memory utilization across several servers can be placed next to graphs of network utilization, allowing Administrators to quickly pinpoint problems. Views can be saved, so the issues can be revisited without having to reconfigure the graphs.
GroundWork service profiles include the configuration information for the creating of performance graphs. If you are implementing a service profile from GroundWork Monitor follow the install instructions and the performance graph configuration will be included.
{Note}Performance View graphs are setup using the Configuration > Performance tool. Metric data from such sources will not be collected, and will not be available as graphs in the Status or Performance View applications, until you have set up an entry here which matches the service+host combination for the data source of interest.{Note}
h4. 3.0 Insight Reports - Alerts, Notifications, Outages
Insight Reports capture both real-time and historical data about system availability and performance and are intended to be management level reports which allow viewing of weekly trends for total Alerts, Notifications, Outages, and top measurement data for Hosts, Services, Host Groups, etc.
Historical reports help identify and track longer-term trends to pro actively manage your IT availability and performance across time. These reports feature drop-down menus for easy configuration by time period and element detail level options for Alerts, Warnings and Notifications. Nagios monitoring logs are imported into the reporting system and Insight Reports can include data from other sources such as other monitoring tools, Service desk products, application logs and configuration databases.
The use of Insight Reports can improve availability by identifying chronic problem areas in the infrastructure that require attention and help make more intelligent decisions on resource allocation or purchasing by examining long term outage, alarming, and notification trends. They can justify or validate current infrastructure by providing usage statistics and improve efficiency of monitoring tools by using reports to optimize the configuration the tools.
The Nagios monitoring system generates a log that contains the results of all Host and Service checks. On a set time, the GroundWork data aggregation program will read this file and load a database with the results. A record is created for each measurement type, component, and day. Alarm, Warning, and Notification data is gathered using this method.
For Outages reports, a GroundWork data aggregation program will generate a Nagios Availability Report using the Nagios Web Interface, and load the results in the database. The data aggregation program uses HTTP to request the Host and Service availability measurements from Nagios.
The Insight Reports CGI programs generate the report pages by querying the database and generating the web pages and charts.
h4. 4.0 SLA Reports
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... h4. 5.0 Custom Reports
h5. GroundWork Monitor Custom Reporting Structure
Along with the pre-defined GroundWork Reports, GroundWork Monitor offers the ability to create, modify, generate, and distribute new monitoring reports using the BIRT Report Designer. The report designer provides reporting features such as report layout, data access and scripting. This feature leverages the GroundWork Custom Web Service Data Extension and a simple Foundation Web Interface for navigating, viewing, and publishing reports.
Access to the Web Service API (SOAP/HTTP) requires a valid session. All third party applications that are integrated into GroundWork Monitor have been updated and comply with this security requirement. The Eclipse BIRT Viewer application is such a third party application. It runs in the context of the portal and makes calls to the Web Service API.
Starting with the release of GroundWork Monitor 6.2, the GroundWork Custom Web Service Data Extension, which is a custom Eclipse ODA to access the Foundation back end, was replaced with the Eclipse Web Service ODA. The Eclipse Web Service ODA is the built-in Web Service component of BIRT 2.5 and newer.
The Eclipse Web Service ODA does not support authentication for SOAP/HTTP requests, therefore a couple of Eclipse BIRT core files were sub-classed to support the authentication requirement for GroundWork Monitor 6.4 and later. The changes are integrated into the BIRT Viewer.
In GroundWork Monitor 6.4 (and later) the authentication requirements for Web Service access has changed in the setup of the Web Service Data Sources and Data Sets when using the Report Designer. The user (report creator) will be prompted for the Foundation Web Service credentials, as specified in the file {{/usr/local/groundwork/config/ws_client.properties}} and in the portal administration application. Once the report is completed, it can be deployed into a system with secured (GroundWork Monitor 6.4 and later) or unsecured (GroundWork Monitor 6.2/6.3) Web Service API without any modifications to the report. The necessary authentication at run time is done by the modified BIRT Viewer.
h5. About BIRT Report Designer
GroundWork Monitor has integrated this reporting process to enable the production of new reports for both web and PDF formats using BIRT. BIRT is an open source, Eclipse-based reporting system used in designing, distributing, and generating new reports. The BIRT Report Designer provides easy-to-use wizards and point-and-click layout capabilities similar to many web page design tools.
GroundWork Monitor provides instructions for installing and configuring the BIRT Report Designer along with the GroundWork supplied plugin to create custom monitoring reports. The environment to create custom report templates is not limited to Linux; the environment can be installed on the report designer’s platform of choice, such as Windows, Apple, Linux, or UNIX. Once the report template or templates have been created they can then be uploaded to the GroundWork server where they can be executed and displayed whenever desired.
The downloadable Report Designer incorporates Eclipse BIRT Report Designer, BIRT Viewer, and a data access extension that will use our Web Services API to query data from Foundation.
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Figure: Custom Reports Structure
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