SiteScope User's Guide

Clarify Monitor

The Clarify Monitor watches for tickets from a Clarify ticketing system application. It checks the results of a query for selected content and can alert you when certain entries are found.

This section describes:

• Usage guidelines
• Setup Requirements
• Completing the Clarify Monitor form
• Troubleshooting the Clarify Monitor

Usage Guidelines

The Clarify Monitor is used to collect information from tickets of the Clarify ticketing application. the information that can be collected includes the ticket description, ticket owner, ticket history, ticket opener details, and references to the hardware / software systems that are related to the incident.

Note: The SiteScope Clarify Monitor receives alerts from the Clarify ticketing system via a database connection. You must therefore have a working JDBC driver installed on the SiteScope machine. If you are using the default driver, Sun Microsystems's JDBC ODBC bridge driver, you must also define a Data Source Name (DSN) with the appropriate ODBC driver. See the following section for more details

Setup Requirements

The following are requirements for using the Clarify Monitor:

• Topaz 4.1sp3 or 4.5 must be installed and configured.
• The SiteScope must be configured to report to Topaz.
• A JDBC database driver must be installed and working on the SiteScope machine in order to communicate with the Clarify database. By default, SiteScope uses Sun Microsystems' JDBC-ODBC bridge driver which is included with the Sitescope installation. If this driver is used then a suitable ODBC driver must be installed on the SiteScope machine in order for the Clarify database to be used. For any other JDBC driver, the driver’s location must be specified in the host’s CLASSPATH environment variable.
• If using a driver other than the default JDBC driver, you must install or copy the database driver or database access API into the appropriate SiteScope directory location. Many database driver packages are available as compressed (zipped) archive files or .jar files. Database drivers in this form must NOT be extracted and must be installed into the <SiteScope home>/java/lib/ext subdirectory. If you extract drivers from their compressed files (not recommended), the individual driver files must be placed in the <SiteScope home>/classes subdirectory instead of the <SiteScope home>/java/lib/ext directory.
• You need to know the syntax for accessing the database driver. Examples of database driver path strings are:
  • sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver - (JDBC-ODBC Bridge Driver from Sun Microsystems)
  • com.inet.tds.TdsDriver - (TDS driver from i-net Software for Microsoft SQL databases)
• You need to know the syntax for the Database Connection URL. The Database Connection URL normally includes the class of driver you are using, some key name relating to the supplier of the driver software, followed by a combination of server, host, and port identifiers. Examples of database connection URL's are:
  • jdbc:odbc:dsname - (where dsname is the data source name in the system environment or configuration)
  • jdbc:inetdae:hostname:port - (where hostname is the name of the host where the database is running and port is the port on which the database interfaces with the driver)
  • jdbc:oracle:thin:@hostname:port:dbname - (where hostname is the name of the host where the database is running, port is the port on which the database interfaces with the driver, and dbname is the name of the Oracle database instance)
• The Clarify database you want to monitor needs to be running, have a database name defined, and have at least one named table created in the database.
• You need a valid username and password to access and perform a query on the Clarify database.
• You need to know a valid SQL query string for the Clarify database instance and database table(s) in the database you want to monitor. Consult your database administrator to work out appropriate queries to test.

Completing the Clarify Monitor Form

To display the Clarify Monitor Form, either click the Edit link for an existing Clarify Monitor in a monitor table, or click the Add a new Monitor to this Group link on a group's detail page and click the Add Clarify Monitor link.

Complete the items on the Clarify Monitor form as follows. When the required items are complete, click the Add Monitor button.

Database Connection URL

Enter a URL to a Database Connection. The easiest way to create a database connection is to use ODBC to create a named connection to the Clarify database. (sometimes referred to as an Authentication string). The syntax of the URL is dependant on the type of driver you use (for example, sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver is the syntax for using the default JDBC-ODBC bridge driver).

Query

enter an SQL Query that describes the clarify tickets you are interested in monitoring. For example, the default query SELECT * FROM TABLE_CASE simply retrieves all the tickets from the Clarify database. .

Database Driver

Enter the driver used to connect to the database. Use the Fully Qualified Class Name of the JDBC driver you wish to use .

Update every

Select how often the monitor should check the Database server. The default interval is to run or update the monitor once every 10 minutes. Use the drop-down list to the right of the text box to specify another update interval in increments of seconds, minutes, hours, or days. The update interval must be 15 seconds or longer.

Title

Enter a title text for this monitor. This text is displayed in the group detail page, in report titles, and other places in the SiteScope interface. If you do not enter a title text, SiteScope will create a title based on the host, server, or URL being monitored.

Advanced Options

The Advanced Options section presents a number of ways to customize monitor behavior and display. Use this section to customize error and warning thresholds, disable the monitor, set monitor-to-monitor dependencies, customize display options, and enter other monitor specific settings required for special infrastructure environments. The options for this monitor type are described below. Complete the entries as needed and click the Add or Update button to save the settings.

Disable

Check this box to temporarily disable this monitor and any associated alerts. To enable the monitor again, clear the box.

Enable EMS Integration

Check this option to have all detected Clarify Alert events forwarded to Topaz.

EMS configuration file path

Enter the path to the EMS integration configuration file. The default location is: SiteScope\ems\Clarify\main.config.
For more information about format of the file see EMS Generic Alert Probe Configuration.

Primary Keys

Enter a semicolon delimited list of database column names that can act as a primary key.

Enable Topaz Synchronization

Check this option to enable Topaz Synchronization

Enable Topaz Synchronization

Select the interval to use for sending data synchronization data to Topaz.

Match Content

Enter a string of text to check for in the query result. If the text is not contained in the result, the monitor will display no match on content. The search is case sensitive. This works for XML tags as well.

You may also perform a Perl regular expression match by enclosing the string in forward slashes, with an "i" after the trailing slash indicating case-insensitive matching. (for example, /href=Doc\d+\.html/ or /href=doc\d+\.html/i). If you want a particular piece of text to be saved and displayed as part of the status, use parentheses in a Perl regular expression. For example /Temperature: (\d+)/. This would return the temperature as it appears on the page and this could be used when setting an Error if or Warning if threshold.

Database Username

Enter the username used to login to the database. If you are using Microsoft SQL server, you can leave this blank and choose NT Authentication when you setup the ODBC connection. With NT Authentication, SiteScope will connect using the login account of the SiteScope service.

Database Password

Enter a password used to login to the database. If you are using Microsoft SQL server, you can leave this blank and choose NT Authentication when you create the ODBC connection. With NT Authentication, SiteScope will connect using the login account of the SiteScope service.

File Path

The Clarify Monitor can read a database query from a file. Enter the name of the file that contains the query you want to run. The file should be a simple text format. Use this feature as an alternative to the Query entry above for complex queries or queries that change and are updated by an external application.

Connection Timeout

Enter a timeout value, in seconds, that the monitor should wait for a database connection.
Note:The sum of the Connection Timeout value and Query Timeout value should always be less than the Update every value for the monitor.

Query Timeout

Enter a timeout value, in seconds, that the monitor should wait for a database query to return results.
Note: The sum of the Connection Timeout value and Query Timeout value should always be less than the Update every value for the monitor.

Note: Some commonly used databases and database drivers do not support the query timeout feature. In these cases the Query Timeout value should be set to zero.

Column Labels

Enter the field labels for the two columns returned by the query, separated by a ",". The field labels should be two of the labels that are returned by the Query string entered above. These column labels are used as data labels in SiteScope reports for Clarify Monitors.

Verify Error

Check this box if you want SiteScope to automatically run this monitor again if it detects an error. When an error is detected, the monitor will immediately be scheduled to run again once.

Note: In order to change the run frequency of this monitor when an error is detected, use the Update every (on errors) option below.

Note: The status returned by the Verify Error run of the monitor will replace the status of the originally scheduled run that detected an error. This may cause the loss of important performance data if the data from the verify run is different than the initial error status.

Warning: Use of this option across many monitor instances may result in significant monitoring delays in the case that multiple monitors are rescheduled to verify errors at the same time.

Update Every (on error)

You use this option to set a new monitoring interval for monitors that have registered an error condition. For example, you may want SiteScope to monitor this item every 10 minutes normally, but as often as every 2 minutes if an error has been detected. Note that this increased scheduling will also affect the number of alerts generated by this monitor.

Schedule

By default, SiteScope monitors are enabled every day of the week. You may, however, schedule your monitors to run only on certain days or on a fixed schedule. Click the Edit schedule link to create or edit a monitor schedule. For more information about working with monitor schedules, see the section on Schedule Preferences for Monitoring.

Monitor Description

Enter any additional information to describe this monitor. The Monitor Description can include HTML tags such as the <BR> <HR>, and <B> tags to control display format and style. The description will appear on the Monitor Detail page.

Report Description

Enter an optional description for this monitor that will make it easier to understand what the monitor does. For example, network traffic or main server response time. This description will be displayed on with each bar chart and graph in Management Reports and appended to the tool-tip displayed when you pass the mouse cursor over the status icon for this monitor on the monitor detail page.

Depends On

To make the running of this monitor dependent on the status of another monitor or monitor group, use the drop-down list to select the monitor on which this monitor is dependent. Select None to remove any dependency.

Depends Condition

If you choose to make the running of this monitor dependent on the status of another monitor, select the status condition that the other monitor or monitor group should have in order for the current monitor to run normally. The current monitor will be run normally as long as the monitor on which it depends reports the condition selected in this option.

List Order

By default, new monitors are listed last on the Monitor Detail page. You may use the drop-down list to choose a different placement for this monitor.

Error if

Set the conditions under which the Clarify Monitor should report an error status. Use the drop-down list to select a criteria based on the content of the results or a performance value. Next select the logic operator(s) for the error criteria. Then enter the value to be used as the threshold or trigger for this condition.

Warning if

Set the conditions under which the Clarify Monitor should report a warning status. Use the steps outlined in the Error if section above.

Good if

Set the conditions under which the Clarify Monitor should report a status of "good". Use the steps outlined in the Error if section above.

Index

Troubleshooting the Clarify Monitor

The following table summarizes common problems and suggested solutions.

Index

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