[nv-l] Fun with Netview: Tips for web client operators

[Leslie Clark <lclark@us.ibm.com>]

 I just love that 'Show In' feature on the context menu in the web client. This week the customer wanted a simple red/yellow/green implementation with a way for the operators to detect who to call when something goes down. Call as in pick up the phone.

I made my usual ProblemNodes Smartset (isNode, and IP Status is Marginal or Critical). I added a field for Maintenance Mode, and added functions for setting it and clearing it from either the web client or the motif map. (That script uses nvdbimport, and a smartset shows what is in maintenance mode).

The customer had a spreadsheet of the different on-call groups for different devices (engineering, unix, etc). I added a field for the oncall groups and made it an enumeration, including the value 'Unset'. We imported those values using nvdbimport.  For good measure, my script that runs when a new node is added to the map sets that field to Unset. And of couse we added a function to the Reports menu (/usr/OV/reports/C) to export and import all of those settings so they can be massively updated. 

We added a smartset for each oncall value, including the Unset,  with the criteria that the oncall field matched, and the IP Status was not Normal and not Unreachable.  So just the problem things go there.

Now if you look at the ProblemNodes smartset with the web client, and right-mouse a node in that smartset, and pick 'Show In', the menu extention that appears tells you at a glance what group to call and whether or not the node is in Maintenance mode (ie ignore it for now).  And of course Show In also gives you a handy way to navigate to the segment that the node appears in so you can see all of the problems in that subnet at once. The oncall person can look at their smartset and see only their problems. Operations can be instructed to acknowledge problems after the call is made, or ignore things that have been acknowledged.  All sorts of procedural possiblities.

What else can you do? Well, you could automatically acknowledge things that are in maintenance mode, so they would appear already ack'd in the ProblemNodes smartset, for one. And you could automatically put certain things in maintenance mode during regularly scheduled outages... it goes on and on. This product is just so much fun!

Integration features used for all of this:
Custom fields (maintenance mode, oncall group)
Ruleset to take action on Node Added event
Script to take that action ( set the oncall field to Unset)
Reports menu (scripts to export /import oncall settings; scripts to set/unset maintenance mode)
Web client menu additions (optional) for the same
Smartsets (maintenance mode, all problem nodes, problem modes per oncall group)

How to define the fields (in /usr/OV/fields/C/myCustom.fields)

Field "ContactGroup" {
        Type    Enumeration;
        Flags   locate, general;
        Enumeration  "Unset",
                "WANGROUP",
                "LANGROUP",
                "MIKE",
                "UNIXGRP",
                "INTELGRP",
                "TIVOLIGRP";
}

Field "MaintenanceMode" {
        Type    String;
        Flags   locate, general;
}

Cordially,

Leslie A. Clark
IBM Global Services - Systems Mgmt & Networking
Detroit