Quick Start Guide for Setting up a Dashboard
Figure 1: Fully configured Dashboard
The best way to get immediate value from your Quest product is to configure
the Dashboard to display information about the devices on your network (after you have run Network Discovery and found them all).
The dashboard to the right (Figure 1) shows a sample dashboard that is
monitoring various aspects of a network.
Some of the gadgets you can use rely on basic network protocols like 'ping' and
others use more sophisticated protocols like SNMP (Simple Network Management
Protocol).
Most 'detail' information (CPU, memory, etc.) will require that you know the
SNMP information for your network. Be sure to checkout the
SNMP Quick Start Guide
(how to turn the service on for your personal machine, how to connect to SNMP on
external devices and some general SNMP details that will help you get started in
monitoring more of your network).
Open the Dashboard
Figure 2: Top 10 Dashboard Template for PacketTrap Perspective
In the top left of the PacketTrap Perspective, you will see a button
that will open the Dashboard
Click the [Dashboard] button and you will pre-populated dashboards that were automatically generated for you.
The dashboard to the right (Figure 2) shows the Top 10 dashboard template that is monitoring critical device details.
Our example will start with an 'Availability List' that will show us if our most important servers are responding to 'ping'.
Add a Gadget to the Dashboard
Figure 3: Add Gadget to Dashboard
Click [Add Tab] button on the right side of the toolbar to create a new dashboard.
Next Click [Add Gadgets] button on the right side of the toolbar and choose the 'Availability List'. An empty Availability List Gadget will be dropped onto your dashboard. You can feel free to drag and drop the Gadget to any place you like on the dashboard page.
TIP:
You can add or remove columns on any dashboard tab by clicking the arrow in the
right corner of the dashboard tab:
Configure the Gadget
Figure 4: Gadget Configuration Wizard
The first of two Gadget Configuration Wizard pages will ask you for some basic information. On the first page, you can:
- Name the gadget
- Choose to display IP Addresses or DNS Name
- Set the details for the ping operation
- Set the thresholds for warning (yellow) and critical (red) levels
- Click [Next >]
On the second page, you can configure the IP addresses you want to watch. You can specify one
IP address at a time or you can specify a range of addresses.
Click [Finish]
when you are done choosing the machines you want to watch and you
will see the gadget populate with devices on your dashboard.
TIP: In this case, the values for Warning and Critical thresholds times are in milliseconds. By default, if a node takes longer than 50ms to respond, it will be displayed with a yellow bar next to it. If a node takes longer than 70ms to respond, it will be displayed with a red bar next to it. Keep in mind that you may want to set these values differently for internal nodes (those which reside on your internal network) versus external nodes (like websites and other machines outside your network).
Run Gadget Run!
Figure 5: The Availability List Gadget in Action
One gadget configuration done. It is that simple.
Repeat this process for as many of the gadgets as you want to add to each Dashboard tab (add more tabs if you run out of room!).
Remember to go through the
SNMP Quick Start Guide if you want help in setting up SNMP and SNMP-based Gadgets. All of the Gadgets that display CPU, Memory and Network Utilization rely on SNMP to get the necessary information from each node.
There's a lot more you can do with the dashboard; but this should give you an idea of how easy it is to set up each gadget.