Diagram Design
When designing diagrams, there are several things to keep in mind to ensure a faster creation and implementation time. To maintain usability, diagrams should not overloaded with too many extraneous colors or widgets, but should still be useful and spiced up to show any information that is useful or needed.
The first thing to keep in mind is the audience that will be viewing the diagram. For example, Executives are usually looking for a high level Is this working? type of diagrams, which would include availability of the top-end services they are offering and number of open versus closed tickets. On the other hand, a NOC operator can be looking for the number of tickets by severity, as well as open versus close tickets by severity, and an event list showing major alarms with associated tickets can be useful, as well as key metric attributes that are important. This can include the server performance that is delivering the service that the executive is viewing.
Diagram Types
The next thing to consider are the different diagram types that are available, and how they can be used in an environment. The three diagram types are:
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Basic diagrams are recommended when metrics from different devices are to be displayed on a single diagram.
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Dynamic device diagrams are similar to basic diagrams and can show various metrics, but will only show the metrics for a single device. Dynamic diagrams are also not directly viewed, but are linked to from another diagram.
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Topology diagrams are dynamically built from information within the graph database, which is usually entered by the Topology Gather Network Inventory job as well as during stitcher execution. There are many options that are available when building topology diagrams.
Widgets
Knowing the available widgets and their capabilities is also very important. Diagrams are comprised of the following three widget types:
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Basic
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Event
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Metric
Basic Widgets
Basic widgets will not change, while event and metric widgets can be configured to show specific information. There are also four basic shapes that are similar across the three types: ellipses, lines, rectangles and text. Each type also has other widgets for displaying different kinds of information, which is explained in further detail below. Each widget can be configured so a custom action is performed when clicked on, such as linking to another diagram, opening a custom URL, or do nothing.
The basic widgets are used when basic rectangles, ellipses, lines and text are needed in a diagram. As basic widgets do not change when the diagram auto-refreshes, rectangle, ellipse and line widgets can be used for grouping several widgets together, or as a means to show separation between other widgets. Text widgets can be used as diagram titles, widget labels, or for other purposes. A URL widget is also available which allows a webpage to be displayed within a diagram, as well as an image widget which allows an image to be displayed in a diagram.
Event Widgets
Event widgets are used when event information is needed in a diagram. The information to be used can be from the results of a pre-configured event filter, all of the events regarding a specific device, all of the events regarding a group of devices that are using a common meta tag, or a temporary event list (also called a Transient Event List) that is generated when the diagram is viewed or refreshed. In addition to the base four widget shapes, there are also gauge and pie event widgets. Rectangle, ellipse and line widgets can change their color based on the highest severity level of any events that are returned. Text widgets can automatically update pieces of information that is displayed to the user. Gauge widgets take the selected event information and display a gauge with an indicator pointing to the highest severity level, along with the count and sum of count values of the information selected. Pie widgets take the selected event information and display the overall event count in a pie graph. Event widgets also have the option to open the event list when clicked on.
Metric Widgets
Metric widgets are used when any kind of metric information is needed on a diagram. In addition to the base four widget shapes, there are also gauge, pie and graph metric widgets. The rectangle, ellipse and line widgets can be configured to change color if a metric threshold is breached, and text widgets can automatically update certain information that is being displayed. A gauge widget is best used to show the utilization of various metrics, while a graphing widget can be used to show how a metric value has changed over the specified period of time. A pie widget is used to represent a metric as a pie graph.