Welcome back to my series on using Foglight services to put your monitored objects into meaningful groups. These may be applications, teams, or production vs. development, and in the rest of this series we will investigate what we can do with these services once we’ve created them. In this exciting episode, we’re going to use our service to create a graphical representation of the service and its’ dependencies. If you haven’t built a service yet, check out the first part of the series.
If you have looked at the Service Operations Console (SOC) for any length of time you should have noticed the service dependency map that Foglight generates for you. This view works well in service models that go many layers deep, but sometimes we want to visualise the data in a way that is more meaningful to the business or user. For that we have the Advanced Service Visualisation.
Creating a Visualisation
You can create a visualisation directly from the SOC by clicking on the tab at the bottom of the screen and clicking the “click here to create…” link. Alternatively you can create them as you build your services by clicking on the “edit” icon for your service in the service builder, and clicking on the Advanced Service Visualisation tab.
Visualisations are nice and easy to create once you are in the dialog box. They are built using a series of links, to add a new one click on the Add icon in the task bar, and choose the two elements to link. Note that dependencies go from left to right, whatever you select in the left depends on the right. For example if you select a web server on the left and a db on the right we are saying that the web server depends on the DB.
Note also that you can only link services, not monitored objects (this is one reason it is a good idea to group tiers and other logical groups into sub services, don’t just dump all your monitored objects into one mammoth service.
Once you have added all your links in the dialog click ok, and head back to the SOC. You will see your visualisation has been added to the tab. The links between components will change colour depending on the health of the dependent service and you can click on each component to see it’s alarms
Uses in Drag and Drop
The SOC isn’t the only place you can see your visualisation. If you drag your service onto a new dashboard and choose “views”, you can select the visualisation template and use it in your dashboards (or even on its own if you like).
