Preamble
The ServiceNav monitoring solution uses some concepts that are unique to it and others that are more common. We will detail them below so that they are well understood because these concepts feature in different parts of the user interface and software documentation.
Concepts:
- Hosts
- Services
- User Services
- Status
- Contacts
- Users and Roles
Hosts
The objective of the monitoring solution is to restore the state of an element of the information system. This element will be named "equipment" in ServiceNav.
Host Category
A piece of equipment can be of several categories:
- Other (equipment with network connectivity but not classifiable in one of the following categories).
- WiFi terminal
- Camera (IP camera type equipment)
- Printer (network printer, network copier type equipment)
- UPS
- Workstation
- Router
- SAN / NAS
- Server (server type equipment: HP UX, VMware, AIX, AS400,...)
- Linux server (Linux server type equipment only)
- Windows server (Microsoft Windows server type equipment only)
- Windows Agent Server (Windows Server type equipment, supervised in Agent mode only).
- Switch
- Telephone (IP phone).
Host categories allow only Host Templates compatible with the Host to be deployed.
Host Template
Host templates are a grouping of individual services (checks) that meet the monitoring needs of a specific technology (for example: Windows server).
Example:
The host template: Windows server includes the following services.
- Service : CPU
- Service: C-disk
- Service: RAM
- Service: ...
Services
A Service represents the monitoring of a specific feature. For example, the CPU service allows the retrieval of the percentage of CPU usage of the host to which it is deployed.
Service Template
Services are created from Service Templates and then modified according to the element to be monitored. Service Templates are pre-configured in order to minimize additional configuration.
Example: CPU Unit Service Model
The CPU Service Template when deployed to a Host supports pre-population of the key arguments (warning threshold, critical threshold and SNMP community) with the Template values as well as the check period and check interval.
User Services
The purpose of a user service is to represent the operation of a service provided to users by either an IT partner or the IT department (e.g., messaging, printing, business applications, etc.). These user services can be made up of equipment, unitary services and user services. Each of these elements can have either a "blocking" or a "degrading" relationship. Depending on the status of the elements of the user service, it will be either : Ok, Degraded or Out of use. The second objective of the user service is to calculate its availability, in order to allow a precise follow-up of the time commitments signed between the provider and the users.
Example: The "Internet" user service must be composed of the elements necessary for Internet access (e.g.: modem, router, firewall, proxy, switch, etc.) If one of these equipment or unitary services does not work, the user service is either blocked or degraded depending on the information system infrastructure
The creation of user services will be explained in the documentation: "Creating user services: best practices and examples".
Status
Hosts, Services and User Services have a status representing their current operational state.
A user service can have the following statuses:
- The status: OK, means that everything is operational
- The status: Out of order, means that the service provided to the user is not operational
- The status: Degraded, means that the user service requires attention from the technical staff, but it remains available for the users.
- The status: Unknown, means that we are not able to know the status of the user service it can be in one of the three states above.
A unitary equipment or service can take the following statuses:
- The status: OK, means that everything is operational
- Status: Critical, means that the equipment or unit service is not operational
- The status: Alert, means that the equipment or the unit service needs special attention but the supervised element is operational. The status: Alert is to prevent problems before they occur.
- The status: Unknown, means that the status of the equipment or the unit service is not known to the supervisor and can be OK, Critical or Alert.
- The status: Undetermined, means that the equipment or the unit service is not yet known by the supervision or that the VS Box does not send any more information.
Contacts
ServiceNav allows you to be notified about certain events detected by the supervision by several means (email, SMS, Push, ...). The people to be notified are identified in the supervision by contacts. These contacts can be ServiceNav users or they can be defined only in ServiceNav without having access to the software. This makes it possible to create contacts for mailing lists and to configure the notification for this list.
Users and Roles
The users of the solution can belong either to an RPC (Reseller Partner Coservit) or to a customer of an RPC i.e. a SIG (Managed Company). Each user has a role allowing him to activate or deactivate certain functions. The definition of the roles is visible from the user creation interface.
