SiteScope User's Guide

About SiteScope Monitors and Groups

Groups are central to working with SiteScope SiteScope monitor configurations are organized and physically stored in group files on the SiteScope server. Sitescope uses group relationships to organize the display of monitor data, trigger alerts and build reports. This section describes:

Planning Groups
Viewing and Navigating SiteScope Groups and Monitors

About Groups

A group is a collection of one or more monitors. A group might be used for multiple instances of one type of monitor, such as URL monitors, or several different monitors that track specific server or portion of your web environment, such as web server, URL, and network parameters related to a specific web-based transaction.

There are two categories of groups in SiteScope: top level groups and subgroups. Top level groups are displayed as the group names in the SiteScope Main Panel. Subgroups are nested as "child" groups within the top level groups and are displayed as line items in the group detail page of its "parent" group. The group name servers as a hyperlink to open the detail view of the monitors and subgroups contained within it.

When you first install SiteScope you have the option to allow SiteScope to set up some default monitors and groups. The default groups are similar to:

Network Group
Server Group
URLs

The monitors in these groups, while not particularly useful for your specific environment, are useful as examples of how to set up monitors, what kinds of monitors you should use, and how they can be organized.

Planning Groups

Each SiteScope monitor must belong to a group, either a top level group or a subgroup. A monitor is an instruction set used by SiteScope to perform an action or poll a system. When you add a new monitor you either add it to an existing group, or you must first create a group for it. SiteScope allows you to define virtually any number of groups. Each group in turn can contain any number of monitors and subgroups regardless of how many monitors you have purchased. For ease of administration it's best to arrange monitors into groups and subgroups that make sense for you. For example, if you intend to monitor a large number of processes running on your system, you may want all of them to be in a single group named "Processes". Or, if you're monitoring processes on several machines using the Remote Monitoring feature, you could create a primary group called Processes with several subgroups named after each of the remote machines that you are monitoring. This type of organization helps tremendously with administration, especially in large monitoring environments.

Here are some things you will want to keep in mind when you start defining your own groups.

The total number of monitors you think you will want to add

The more monitors you want to add, the more important your grouping becomes. When you have a large number of monitors, it's important that they're grouped in such a manner that it's easy to remember where they are located for administration purposes.

How you want to structure alert generation

SiteScope generates alerts based upon parameters set by you . You may define alerts for individual monitors or groups of monitors. For example, you may tell SiteScope to generate an alert anytime one specific monitor is in error, or you may instruct it to generate an alert when any monitor in a specific group of monitors is in error. Therefore, it's important that you put some thought into how you want to structure your alerts prior to assigning them to groups.

How your Web environment will change down the road

If you will be expanding your Web environment in the near future, for example adding more Web servers on the machine on which SiteScope is running, you will want to keep in mind what those changes will mean in terms of monitoring requirements and plan accordingly.

How often you will want to change monitoring parameters

If there are certain kinds of monitors that you will want to edit fairly regularly, for example URL monitors, you may want to group them into a single group for easier administration.

The number of groups you need.

Administration becomes tricky if you have a large number of randomly created groups and subgroups. Defining well organized groups helps you with the following:

Monitor management
Alert management
Report management

No matter how you choose to setup your groups and monitors, SiteScope allows you to easily make changes with a set of tools that manage monitors and groups.

Viewing and Navigating SiteScope Groups and Monitors

SiteScope has several options for viewing the status of your system monitoring and navigating between groups and monitors. These include:

SiteScope Main Panel: As mentioned in the previous section, this is the default SiteScope navigation and status display. It displays the highest level (worst) status of monitors in the group and the group name. Group names are links to the group detail pages of the top level groups
Multi-view Panel: Navigation in the Multi-view Panel is similar to the SiteScope Main Panel. The Multi-view panel allows you to display SiteScope monitoring results from multiple SiteScope servers in a single interface.
Group Detail Page: Each group has a group detail page. As implied in the name, this page displays the individual status of monitors in the groups along with the most recent status reading and when the monitor was last run. This page also has links for editing the monitor configurations, adding subgroups, adding monitor sets and other functions.
Manage Monitors and Groups: This view lets you see monitor group hierarchy in an expanding tree structure. The hyperlinks allow you to navigate to the group detail page for each group. This view also includes features to copy, delete, disable, refresh, and rename monitors and groups.
Monitor Browser: Filter and display monitors based on status, type, independent of the group they belong to
Monitor Description Report: Review monitor configuration settings such as run frequency. This report page currently does not have links to the subject monitors but it can be useful in reviewing the configuration settings being used.