Step 9: Visualize Data

This section describes how to visualize your environment’s data (using the dashboard, graphs, and so on) in Horizon.

Horizon home page

The Horizon home page presents an overview of important network status metrics, as soon as you log in. By default, it displays pending situations and problems, ongoing outages, 24-hour availability statistics, and a map showing real-time regional status data.

By default, the visualizations on the home page are not filtered. You can apply filters to the data using the sections on the right side of the screen (Resource Graphs, KSC Reports, and Quick Search). For more information, see Grafana Dashboard Box in the Deep Dive section.

Dashboard

You can view the default dashboard by clicking Dashboards  Dashboard in the top menu bar. The dashboard compiles network environment data to generate an overview of monitored components. This information can often be a useful starting point for more detailed analysis of issues.

The dashboard includes the following components:

  • Surveillance view: Lets you model a monitoring context on the dashboard. You can reduce visible information by selecting rows, columns, and cells to focus on, quickly limiting the data that you have to sift through. The rest of the dashboard updates dynamically.

  • Alarms: Shows unacknowledged alarms which should be escalated.

  • Notifications: Shows outstanding and unacknowledged notifications.

  • Outages: Shows all ongoing network outages.

  • Resource graphs: Shows time series reports for performance diagnosis.

For more information on each of the components, see Horizon Dashboard in the Deep Dive section.

Surveillance View

The Surveillance View is similar to its component of the same name in the dashboard. Click Status  Surveillance in the top menu bar to view it.

Just like in the Dashboard, you can select rows, columns, and cells to narrow your data focus.

For more information, see Surveillance View in the Deep Dive section.

Visualize data using surveillance categories

The Surveillance View and its corresponding dashboard component visualize all routers, switches, and servers in your production, test, and development environments by default (see Default configuration). You can create custom surveillance categories to define specific data that you want to visualize in the Surveillance View.

Follow these steps to create a surveillance category that monitors the localhost node:

  1. Click the gear symbol in the top-right of the screen.

  2. Under Provisioning, click Manage Surveillance Categories.

  3. Type a name for the new category in the Category Name box. For this example, we use "localhost-category".

  4. Click Add New Category.

  5. Click the edit symbol beside the new category.

  6. Add the localhost node to the category by selecting it in the Available Nodes list and clicking Add. Your changes are automatically saved.

You can now create a Surveillance View to visualize localhost in your production environment:

  1. Click the gear symbol in the top-right of the screen.

  2. Under Additional Tools, click Surveillance Views Configuration. A list of configured Surveillance Views is displayed.

  3. Click Add, and define the view’s title. For this example, we use "localhost-view".

  4. Define the view’s refresh timing, in seconds.

  5. Click Add beside the Rows list and type a name for the new row. For this example, we use "localhost".

  6. Select localhost-category from the Categories list and click Save.

  7. Click Add beside the Columns list and type a name for the new row. For this example, we use "Production".

  8. Select Production from the Categories list and click Save.

  9. Click Save to create the Surveillance View.

    • (Optional) Click Preview beside the view’s name to display it.

    • (Optional) Select Default beside the view’s name to make it the one that is displayed by default.

The Surveillance View dashboard component includes a menu where you can select the view to be displayed. Its default visualization is defined separately from the Surveillance View itself.

Heatmap

You can use the heatmap to display either unacknowledged alarms or ongoing node outages. Each visualization can be applied to categories, foreign sources, or node services. Click Status  Heatmap in the top menu bar to view the heatmap.

For more information, see Heatmap in the Deep Dive section.

Trend

The Trend page displays small, inline charts of database-related statistics (nodes experiencing outages, unacknowledged alarms, and so on). Click Status  Trend in the top menu bar to view it.

For more information, see Trend in the Deep Dive section.

Beyond Quick Start

Refer to Visualizations in the Deep Dive section for more information on visualizations, including the following: