More degrees of freedom on reports

[Photon]

Photon [http://community.zenoss.org/people/Photon] created the discussion

"More degrees of freedom on reports"

To view the discussion, visit: http://community.zenoss.org/message/74210#74210

--------------------------------------------------------------
Hi every1,

  I need some advice creating SLA reports for our clients. We use our network to provide services such as Data connectivity, Voice, SMS... I'll refer to them as services in this discussion. Our needs are as follow :
1) To be able to use multiple metrics in graph reports (solved by multi-graph reports)
2) To be able report on services availability
3) To be able to report on the number of events, duration and severity for each service

  As you may guess, each service depends on a number of collected metrics, statuses, traps and devices availabilites. Services are on the top of the dependance chain...

  I am still wondering what's the best course of action.  Should I bypass Zenoss and write a script that queries the database for all the basic info then processes them ? Should I write a zenpack using this script and install it ? Is there some prefered way besides directly attacking the database (it changed alot on the 4.x update. It could change again...)

  Any advice / experience related to this situation would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
--------------------------------------------------------------

Reply to this message by replying to this email -or- go to the discussion on Zenoss Community
[http://community.zenoss.org/message/74210#74210]

Start a new discussion in zenoss-users at Zenoss Community
[http://community.zenoss.org/choose-container!input.jspa?contentType=1&containerType=14&container=2003]

[Jose Salvatierra]

Jose Salvatierra [http://community.zenoss.org/people/jslvtr] created the discussion

"Re: More degrees of freedom on reports"

To view the discussion, visit: http://community.zenoss.org/message/74258#74258

--------------------------------------------------------------
Without knowing how your services and databases and zenoss are structured, it's difficult to advise on this. What we've done is create python scripts that query the database, generate PDF files and e-mails them to customers, all of this outside of zenoss.

It has worked quite well, so if your database allows for this and you don't need what zenoss offers you, you can always do it this way.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Reply to this message by replying to this email -or- go to the discussion on Zenoss Community
[http://community.zenoss.org/message/74258#74258]

Start a new discussion in zenoss-users at Zenoss Community
[http://community.zenoss.org/choose-container!input.jspa?contentType=1&containerType=14&container=2003]

[Photon]

Photon [http://community.zenoss.org/people/Photon] created the discussion

"Re: More degrees of freedom on reports"

To view the discussion, visit: http://community.zenoss.org/message/74369#74369

--------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks to the both of you for your input.
  In fact, the main part is getting a report based on a chain of dependency that I can create. Service Impact package does at least a part of it. Sadly, management isn't about to buy the package :-)
  Also, simulating end-user requests to know if a service is up or down is impossible in my case  Although, this trick can be used in the middle of the dependance chain to shorten it.
  The AO / FO trick is a neat one. I think I'll use the summary to provide a begin-date and end-date and create an event class for AO/FO events. Thanks !
  So, I guess I'm stuck with developping scripts just as Jose Salvatierra proposed because Zenoss (Community Edition) doesn't offer much for my case.  Can't ask for too much for free, I guess ^^
  Jose Salvatierra : did you attack directly the MySQL database or use some functions provided by the Zenoss environment to extract event objects ?

Best Regards,
--------------------------------------------------------------

Reply to this message by replying to this email -or- go to the discussion on Zenoss Community
[http://community.zenoss.org/message/74369#74369]

Start a new discussion in zenoss-users at Zenoss Community
[http://community.zenoss.org/choose-container!input.jspa?contentType=1&containerType=14&container=2003]

[Shane Scott]

Shane Scott [http://community.zenoss.org/people/hackman238] created the discussion

"Re: More degrees of freedom on reports"

To view the discussion, visit: http://community.zenoss.org/message/74402#74402

--------------------------------------------------------------
Photon,

With reguard to performance reports in Zenoss v4.x, there's nothing better in entperise. There is, however, more canned reports.

With regaurd to reports based around SLA using events in Zenoss v4.x the best approach would be to create a ZEP connection (use the zep facade in zendmd or zenscriptbase) and query for the events. This lets you leverage the catalogs, indexes and archived data. I highly reccomend avoiding interfacing witht he zenoss-zep database in v4.x. Another approach would be to use Zenoss Analytics, which is a add on for Zenoss Enterprise. I do not believe it will solve your specific need out of the box, however.

Best,
--Shane Scott (Hackman238)
http://linkedin.com/in/shanewilliamscott http://linkedin.com/in/shanewilliamscott
http://shanewilliamscott.com http://shanewilliamscott.com
--------------------------------------------------------------

Reply to this message by replying to this email -or- go to the discussion on Zenoss Community
[http://community.zenoss.org/message/74402#74402]

Start a new discussion in zenoss-users at Zenoss Community
[http://community.zenoss.org/choose-container!input.jspa?contentType=1&containerType=14&container=2003]

[Photon]

Photon [http://community.zenoss.org/people/Photon] created the discussion

"Re: More degrees of freedom on reports"

To view the discussion, visit: http://community.zenoss.org/message/74489#74489

--------------------------------------------------------------
I guess that's the way to go. It seems more stable and cleaner to create a ZEP connection as you said. We'll be developping our own SLA reporting tool based on what Zenoss collects. We'll also add some input from our trouble ticket system.
Thank you all for your help.
Best Regards,
--------------------------------------------------------------

Reply to this message by replying to this email -or- go to the discussion on Zenoss Community
[http://community.zenoss.org/message/74489#74489]

Start a new discussion in zenoss-users at Zenoss Community
[http://community.zenoss.org/choose-container!input.jspa?contentType=1&containerType=14&container=2003]

[Charles Wilkinson]

Charles Wilkinson [http://community.zenoss.org/people/charles81] created the discussion

"Re: More degrees of freedom on reports"

To view the discussion, visit: http://community.zenoss.org/message/74273#74273

--------------------------------------------------------------
I think Zenoss Enterprise has an additional package called "Service Impact" which has a lot of features for correlating the different devices and components that come together to form an end service to the user.  I'm pretty sure its mainly for viewing the whole chain of dependencies and root cause analysis but presumably you'd be able to get reporting on this as well.

Personally I'd try to create some special monitor that effectively acts like an end user attempting to simply use the service.  I recall there is some special monitoring available with the enterprise product that can take a recorded session from firefox and run it.  So if you had a web service you simply get into firefox and try to run through all the primary functions of your site, recording the session for the system to play back.  Or you build some special script that makes various calls to either a website or another service and returns any issues.  Its all about trying to nut your servicing monitoring down to the occurance or absence of one monitor.  If that monitor is succeeding, you know you're good.  If its failing your customers are affected.

Even outside of that there can be things that are considered downtime that you might not be able to monitor or anticipate.  Something like the site not updating with latest specials, etc overnight.  From the service point of view its not working but the customers can't get the deals that they were expecting from a catalogue or such.  The only solution I have for this is to allow manual entries of downtime as they're determined to exist by using backdated Maintenance windows against the device/monitor.  So you have users create a maintenance window to a certain standard such as "AO_<incident#>" for Added Outage and even an override for when the outage detected by the monitor was false "FO_<incident#>" for False Outage.

Your report effectively needs to just look for events from that one monitor within a data-range, take the difference between the first and last time, ignoring any which co-incide with an associated "FO_" maintenance window then add in any "AO_" windows.

Of course if this isn't feasable for some reason then you're likely talking about grouping the appropriate systems into a "Group" organizer and doing some really tricky and complex filtering at the reports end or trying to do a lot of work at the events level to possibly make sure that any, and only, events which indicate an outage are at a level of "critical" and filter that way.  But even then you could get one-off events such as those from the event logs which don't repeat until the problem subsides.

Its a tricky and complex thing to configure, particularly with a complex system that has many interdependencies across multiple systems that might also provide components for other services you also or don't care about... Thats likely why they charge for it ;)
--------------------------------------------------------------

Reply to this message by replying to this email -or- go to the discussion on Zenoss Community
[http://community.zenoss.org/message/74273#74273]

Start a new discussion in zenoss-users at Zenoss Community
[http://community.zenoss.org/choose-container!input.jspa?contentType=1&containerType=14&container=2003]