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Reporting

Reporting
About Reporting
This chapter covers the following topics:
Reports
The Monitoring headline basically covers everything in op5 Monitor that is happening in real time. It shows you the status on your hosts and services right now. The Reporting headline is about letting the user create historical reports from the information that op5 Monitor has collected.
A monitoring system receives a huge amount of data from your IT environment. op5 Monitor has a powerful but yet very easy built-in report generator.
Reports are made from events that have occurred in time, by elements, services or specific groups.
SLA
The reports in op5 Monitor can be mapped against unique Service Level Agreements. This means that you can directly see and follow-up both your internal and external SLAs.
Creating a SLA report
You can either do it a fast an easy way and only follow step 1-3 and 11 in the following guide. By doing that you will use default values in almost all settings.
The complete instruction describes all settings.
To create a SLA report
1
In the main menu to the left click SLA Reporting
And the report setup page is displayed
2
Choose Report type (what type of objects to base your reports on).
We use hostgroups in this guide.
3
4
Select Reporting period and Report timeperiod. If you leave Report timeperiod empty it will be the same as 24/7.
5
*
*
6
a
Choose if you like to count scheduled downtime as uptime, acutal state or uptime with difference.
Uptime, with difference will calculate downtime without scheduled downtime but will show the difference between actual statate and the actual state when scheduled downtime is calculted as uptime.
b
c
d
Choose whether to assume if the system is logging initial states or not. op5 Monitor does by default so if you have not changed anything in the nagios.cfg file leave the default value as it is.
e
7
8
If you like to save your report already here in this state check the Save report box and type in the name of the report. This can be done later.
9
Check Cluster mode to create the report where the group logic is reversed so that the OK/UP time is calculated using the most positive service/host state of the selected objects.
10
Type in the SLA values with values from 0.00 to 100.00.
Click on the icon in front of the name of the months to copy the value to the other months that are available 4.
11
Click Create report.
SLA report result
When you have created your report you will get a result page looking like this.
The table below describes the parts of the result page
Availability
The availability report shows availability of host groups, service groups, hosts or services during a selected report period.
op5 Monitor comes with two different kinds of availability reports. The standard one that comes with Nagios and a new one with extended functionality and nicer presentation. As default the op5 availability report is used but you can reach the old CGI reports by clicking on the Old Availability link.
Creating an Availability report
You can either do it a fast an easy way and only follow step 1-3 and 10 in the following guide. By doing that you will use default values in almost all settings.
The complete instruction describes all settings.
To create an Availability report
1
In the main menu to the left click Availability
And the report setup page is displayed
2
Choose Report type (what type of objects to base your reports on).
We use hostgroups in this guide.
3
4
Select Reporting period and Report timeperiod. If you leave Report timeperiod empty it will be the same as 24/7.
5
*
*
6
a
b
c
d
Check this check box if you like to have the report output in CSV format instead of the ordinary graphical result.
e
Choose whether to assume if the system is logging initial states or not. op5 Monitor does by default so if you have not changed anything in the nagios.cfg file leave the default value as it is.
f
7
8
If you like to save your report already here in this state check the Save report box and type in the name of the report. This can be done later.
9
Check Cluster mode to create the report where the group logic is reversed so that the OK/UP time is calculated using the most positive service/host state of the selected objects.
10
Click Create report.
Availability report result
When you have created your report you will get a result page looking like this.
The table below describes the different parts of the result page.
 
This is the average value for a group of hosts/services. It is calculated by adding the % Time for each host/service and then divide the total value with the amount of hosts/services in the group.
This value is only calculated for UP and PROBLEM states (for services OK and PROBLEM states). It displays the amount of time where all hosts/services in the group has been UP/OK or in a PROBLEM state at the same time.
The Make testcase button creates debug information to send to the developers at op5 if needed for any support case.
Editing the availability report settings
You do not have to create a totally new report if you only like to change a minor settings of the one you just created.
To edit the settings
1
2
3
Click Update report to save the new values.
 
Save reports
There are two reasons for saving a report:
*
*
As you saw in Creating a SLA report on page 94 and Creating an Availability report on page 99 and you are able to save the report already when creating it from the beginning. Many times you like to see the result first and maybe edit some settings before you save the report.
The procedure is the same for both SLA reports and Availability reports. In the guide below we will use a SLA report.
Saving a report
To save a report
1
2
3
4
Click Save.
Schedule reports
When you want to have the reports on regularly basis and do not want to get it through the op5 Monitor GUI each time it is a good idea to schedule the report.
Before you schedule a report you ned to create it ( Creating a SLA report on page 94 or Availability report result on page 102) and then save it (Save reports on page 104 ).
Scheduling reports can be done from two places in the GUI:
*
*
In the guides below we will schedule a SLA report but it is done exactly the same way for the availability reports.
To schedule a report from the result page
1
2
3
4
a
b
c
d
Add a path where to save the report. The path must be absolute and include the filename, with either .pdf or .csv prefix depending in what format you want the file. This is optional.
e
5
Click Save.
Modifying scheduled reports
To modify a scheduled report
1
2
3
Click OK to save.
4
If you want to save the report as file, enter a absolute path including the filename and prefix (.pdf or .csv) in local persistent filepath.
Deleting scheduled reports
To modify a scheduled report
1
2
3
Debug Availability reports
Sometimes things does not work as they are supposed to do. There fore we have built in a debug button for the Availability reports. This makes it easy to send the needed data to the op5 developers.
To send debug data to op5
1
2
Click Make testcase.
3
Save the file report-test.txt
4
Send an email to op5 Support with the report-test.txt file attached to the email.
 
Events and logs
Alert summary - Top alert producers
One of the most useful things when working with op5 Monitor is the Top alert producers report. This report is created from the Alert summary.
The Top alert producers reports makes it easy to identify the biggest problem producers in your environment monitored by op5 Monitor.
There are a few predefined alert summary reports included in op5 monitor but to get the top alert producers we need to create a custom report.
Creating a Top alert producers report
To create a Top alert producers report
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Click Create Summary Report.
Top alert producers result
Now we have a report ready to be examined.
The reason for doing this is to minimize the number of false alerts and false notifications. Now start working with the problems. The sooner the better. You do not want to end up with a monitoring system you do not think you can trust.
Saving an Alert summary report
Alert summary reports are usefull from time to time. So when you have created a new one you will probably like to use that one an other time. Then it is a good idea to save it.
To save an Alert summary report.
1
2
Click Save report.
3
Scheduling an Alert summary report
For the exact same reason as it is to schedule an availability report or a SLA report you might want to schedule an alert summary report.
To schedule an alert summary report
1
2
3
Chose:
Report interval
Recipients (email address separated by a comma)
Filename (the name of the pdf that will be sent to the recipients)
4
Click Save.
Trends
Trends display a graphic view of status on a host or a service during a selected time period. This graphical view can also be reached from Availability reports.
Creating a trend report
To create a trend report
1
2
3
4
a
b
Choose whether to assume if the system is logging initial states or not. op5 Monitor does by default so if you have not changed anything in the nagios.cfg file leave the default value as it is.
c
5
6
Click Create report.
Viewing a Trend report
The Trend report result is actually divided into two parts.
*
*
The picture below shows the result page.
The table below describes the different parts of the trend reports result page.
This whole part of the result page show you the corresponding availability report breakdown for the objects in the trend report.
Clicking the action icons and you will get other useful information about each and one of the hosts included in this report.
Event log
Events is actually a long list of all evens that has occurred on a host. It shows you everything from alerts and notifications to op5 Monitor service restartings. In other words this is a log viewer for the main op5 Monitor log.
Viewing and filtering logs
In the op5 Monitor event log you can
*
*
*
To view the event log
Click Event log icon in the main menu and there you go.
As you can see in the picture below everything except for Initial and logrotation states are shown by default.
The event log view is divided into two parts
*
*
In the filtering you can change what type of events you like to show and also between what dates you like to view logs for.
The logs are grouped by hours to make it a bit easier to find what you are looking for.
Alert History
The alert history view is a view for all alerts that has been detected by the system.
Viewing and filtering logs
In the op5 Monitor alert history you can
*
*
*
To view the alert history
Click Alert history icon in the main menu and there you go.
Filter alert history
The list can be long to try filter it by using the pre-defined filter options, time periods and free text filters to narrow down your search.
 

1
Traditional Availability reports are based on group availability (worst case). An alternative way is to use average values for the group or object in question. Note that using average values are by some, considered not to be actual SLA.

2
If the application is not running for some time during a report period we can by this option decide to assume states for hosts and services during the downtime.

3
If there is no information about the host or service in the current log file, op5 Monitor can assume status of the host/service.

4
Only the months that is included in the report and where data is found will be available.

5
Traditional Availability reports are based on group availability (worst case). An alternative way is to use average values for the group or object in question. Note that using average values are by some, considered not to be actual SLA.

6
If the application is not running for some time during a report period we can by this option decide to assume states for hosts and services during the downtime.

7
If there is no information about the host or service in the current log file, op5 Monitor can assume status of the host/service.

8
Since this is the first time we generate this report we use the last 31 days. When you use this on, for example, weekly basis you could use the last 7 days.

9
If you have a large environment with a lots of host you might want to increase the number of shown items.

10
If the application is not running for some time during a report period we can by this option decide to assume states for hosts and services during the downtime.

11
If there is no information about the host or service in the current log file, op5 Monitor can assume status of the host/service.


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