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APM 10.1 Dashboard Templates - Any Good Ones Out There?

  • 1.  APM 10.1 Dashboard Templates - Any Good Ones Out There?

    Posted May 13, 2016 11:26 AM

    I am looking for any and all types of APM Introscope (WV or Wkst) dashboard templates anyone might have that provides a comprehensive view (tabbed approach or what have you) w/n a single dashboard and NOT having to go to multiple dashboards from the Console Window drop-down. I know that you can create multiple dashboards all having links to a main dashboards so can just double click them to go from one to the other.

     

    Anything you guys have out there that you don't mind sharing would be greatly appreciated.

     

    I understand that you can change the data options w/n the dashboard template so not worried about that. I am look for some good ideas and/or template you guy all have found useful.

     

    Thanks in advance

    Manish



  • 2.  Re: APM 10.1 Dashboard Templates - Any Good Ones Out There?

    Posted May 31, 2016 05:13 PM

    Anyone have anything on this?



  • 3.  Re: APM 10.1 Dashboard Templates - Any Good Ones Out There?

    Posted Jun 02, 2016 09:38 AM

    Hi Manish,

     

    Your call for dashboard templates is one of special interest, but not sure how the social dynamics of different companies will related to any other.  That being said, our dashboards are, well, very tuned into what our end users have decided is important based on past events, that the over all dashboard presentation would have little or no meaning.

     

    Our primary dashboard, called "The Cake" has been our primary dashboard for a large group of our end users for five years.  The base premise was that the various layers (http, on demand routers, websphere application servers, applications, services, databases) were in that order and structure, were if we say a database were to have trouble, then the alerts should light up from the very bottom all the way to the top.  Well, the Cake never worked that way with all of the load balancing and failover built into the various layers.

     

    On review of our custom dashboards, we found that over 80% of our alert structure, the alerts that our end users have requested, was outside of Application Agent, but mostly at the environment performance agents that we have customized with a number of perl scripts to monitor system vmstat, netstat, procstat, df, and named processes.

     

    For the last several years, I've struggled to shift from our custom view with our Cake dashboard, to be more focused on the actual applications, but now we get into the silos that are very well fortified with the application owners, middleware owners, service owners, database owners and infrastructure owners fragmenting.  The silos are so fortified that the groups have great aversion to war-room groupings, with each group stating that it isn't their part and shutting down.

     

    So, I'm trying to re-approach the problem using the EPIC pattern of perspectives and Team Center.  The transition is becoming more daunting with trying to customize the epagents to appear within context of Team Center.  Once the epagent has published a artificial application trace, then trying to get the custom alerts that are outside of the standard five application metrics, to appear and alerts to be focused on basic system resource metrics.

     

    While this is only one of the multiple paths, with talks of pulling in Unified Infrastructure Management (CA UIM) and having the apm-gateway publish infrastructure alerts over to APM, I think we will be in the same boat since the base APM Team Center will not be aware of the UIM artifacts and will need to customize the epagent that UIM is using to do the artificial application transaction trace. 

     

    Not sure if this helps, but thought I would at least chime in.

     

    Billy



  • 4.  Re: APM 10.1 Dashboard Templates - Any Good Ones Out There?

    Posted Jun 02, 2016 11:46 AM

    bwcole - thanks a lot for posting your thoughts. I totally agree with you on different customers will have diff types of their own versions of dashboards. That's exactly what I am looking for b/c that will give me some ideas as well as template copies from which I can present to my customers the look and feel. This helps my customers in determining how they can use these templates (screenshots etc..) to come up with something that could work best for them. Since my customers are new the concept of Application Monitoring, it's a building from scratch type of effort.

     

    Thanks again for you feedback Billy.



  • 5.  Re: APM 10.1 Dashboard Templates - Any Good Ones Out There?

    Posted Jun 02, 2016 11:57 AM

    If you are approaching customers that are new to the concept of application monitoring, really suggest going down the branch of using Team Center instead of using custom dashboards.  With custom dashboards, there are quite a few abilities that would be way outside of the APM context that will lead to more effort, requires more skills/training, and quite easy to distort what APM is built/defined to do.

     

    Much like my case, where we have built ourselves into a corner and it is not just a matter of training the end users, it is a matter of selling, un-training, trying to match possible use cases and then training all the end users to use Team Center. Not an easy task.

     

    The version 10.x EPIC Perspectives within Team Center seems to be going into a reasonable path and appears to be getting support and traction from CA.

     

    I would suggest getting ahold of the "protect your expert" user profiles and then show how out of the box, or with some tweaks APM will provide support for several of the customer's roles.

     

    Just my two cents, hope this helps.



  • 6.  Re: APM 10.1 Dashboard Templates - Any Good Ones Out There?

    Posted Jun 02, 2016 12:03 PM

    Yeah, Team Center definitely helps. I've been conducting periodic training sessions with each application group so that is helping. The training sessions allows them to learn the in-depth content that APM provides which they've never seen before. A bit overwhelming, sure, but priceless for them. This is a learning year so baby steps

     

    Thanks

    Manish



  • 7.  Re: APM 10.1 Dashboard Templates - Any Good Ones Out There?

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Jun 02, 2016 12:09 PM

    Hi Manish:

         Over the years, I gathered some templates presentations (some may be customer-specific) and some template rule creation that Mike Rissser uses,) Would have to review on how much of this can be made public. I expect APM presales staff would have these as well...



  • 8.  Re: APM 10.1 Dashboard Templates - Any Good Ones Out There?

    Posted Jun 02, 2016 12:15 PM

    Hallett_German

    That would be great if you can get those available to me. I remember Mike Risser, worked with him in the past. Can we reach out also to APM presales staff? Or you can include folks here on this thread.

    mrisser3



  • 9.  Re: APM 10.1 Dashboard Templates - Any Good Ones Out There?

    Posted Jun 08, 2016 02:26 AM

    Hallett_German

     

    Crickets .....!!!!!



  • 10.  Re: APM 10.1 Dashboard Templates - Any Good Ones Out There?

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Jun 08, 2016 07:42 AM

    Manish:

    Sorry for the silence

       I was off for two days performing a wedding so I am playing catchup. Let me check now what I have. These are distributed AS IS



  • 11.  Re: APM 10.1 Dashboard Templates - Any Good Ones Out There?

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Jun 08, 2016 07:59 AM

    Manish:

    I have more examples but these have been sanitized. I ca't find the document that I created. This is as much as how to construct more than the look. Hope is helpful

     

    Thanks

    Hal



  • 12.  Re: APM 10.1 Dashboard Templates - Any Good Ones Out There?

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Jun 08, 2016 08:13 AM
      |   view attached

    I Found the doc on Mike's approach :-) Distributed AS-IS



  • 13.  Re: APM 10.1 Dashboard Templates - Any Good Ones Out There?

    Posted Jun 08, 2016 09:37 AM

    Thanks Hallett_German for providing those docs and power points. That should be enough for now to get me started.