Synthetic Indicator Types Quick Start Guide

About

SevOne NMS plugins–such as SNMP – use indicator types to collect data from indicators on the objects that you monitor. There are two types of indicator types: atomic and synthetic. Atomic indicator types are measured directly by plugins. Synthetic indicator types, on the other hand, calculate values based on the values resulting from other indicator types.

SevOne NMS comes with some built-in synthetic indicator types. On the Object Types page, under Interface (SNMP Poller), for example, you'll find the synthetic indicator type s1_total_octets.

s1_total_octets provides the total number of octets based on an expression that adds the results of two existing indicator types, ifInOctets and ifOutOctets. Specifically, it adds the number of In Octets to the number of Out Octets to determine the total number of octets. In this case, our synthetic indicator type expression includes two atomic indicator types. The expression can also include other synthetic indicator types.

Using synthetic indicator types, you can create your own key performance indicators (KPIs) even when those KPIs–such as Percent Usage, Percent Loss, Percent Error, and Percent Idle–don't exist on a device. For example, let's say that you want to monitor voice gateways to find out which primary rate interface (PRI) is getting the most usage. Typical poll metrics can tell you the busy status of individual bearer channels, or B channels, but they can't tell you the sum of the statuses for all the B channels. This makes it difficult to find out the total usage of a particular PRI.

In SevOne NMS, you can create a single indicator type that tells you what percentage of a PRI is being used.

First, we need the following:

• An existing indicator type that tells us how many busy B channels there are for a given PRI. Let's call this BChannelsBusy.

• The total number of B channels for our PRI. That number is 23.

Using this information, we can create a synthetic indicator type with an expression to perform the following calculation:

(BChannelsBusy*23)/100

Now we have a new indicator type–a synthetic indicator type–that tells us what percentage of the PRI is being used. There's no need to look up the number of busy B channels and perform calculations manually.

Configuration Steps

Synthetic indicator types are created using existing indicator types, which can be either atomic or synthetic. This means that in order to create a new synthetic indicator type, there must already be at least one indicator type–either atomic or synthetic–to work with.

You can define synthetic indicator types for the following plugins:

• Calculation

• Deferred Data

• JMX

• SNMP

• WMI

• xStats

Perform the following steps to create (or edit) an SNMP synthetic indicator type.

1. From the navigation bar, click Administration and select Monitoring Configuration, then Object Types.
   

2. The Filter drop-down is set to SNMP Poller by default. In the Object Types hierarchy on the left, you'll see the object types that the SNMP plugin can poll.

3. Click on an object type to display its indicator types on the right. If the object type doesn't have any indicator types, the Add Synthetic Indicator Type button won't appear.
   

4. Click Add Synthetic Indicator Type to display the Add Synthetic Indicator Type pop-up. To edit an existing synthetic indicator type, select the indicator type and click under Actions to display the Edit Synthetic Indicator Type pop-up.
   

5. In the Indicator Name field, enter the name of the synthetic indicator type.

6. In the Description field, enter the name to display.

   You'll see the indicator description displayed in reports and elsewhere in the UI. Keep this in mind when creating the indicator description. For example, when you look at an object's indicators, you'll notice that they're listed based on the first word of their description. If you have the two indicators Queued Bytes and Transmitted Bytes, they won't appear together. However, if you use the descriptions Bytes Queued and Bytes Transmitted, the indicators will appear in close proximity to each other.

7. The Synthetic Indicator Expression field is where you define the calculation. Perform the following actions to create the expression for this field.

   A red border around the Synthetic Indicator Expression field indicates that your calculation is invalid. This also means that your graph results will be incorrect.

   1. In the Available Source Indicators field on the right, select an indicator type to use in the expression. Drag and drop it into the Synthetic Indicator Expression field.

      The Available Source Indicators field contains the indicator types for the object type that you selected a few steps ago.

   2. Next, enter the applicable operators to formulate your calculation in the Synthetic Indicator Expression field. For a list of available operators, see Acceptable Operators below.

   3. Drag any additional indicator types from the Available Source Indicators field and enter additional mathematical symbols to complete the expression in the Synthetic Indicator Expression field.

8. The Maximum Value Expression field lets you define a maximum value calculation for the indicator type. Perform the following actions to create the expression for this field.

   1. In the Available Source Indicators field on the right, select an indicator type to use in the expression. Drag and drop it into the Maximum Value Expression field.

   2. Next, enter the applicable operators to formulate your calculation in the Maximum Value Expression field. For a list of available operators, see Acceptable Operators below.

   3. Drag any additional indicator types from the Available Source Indicators field and enter additional mathematical symbols to complete the expression in the Maximum Value Expression field.

9. Click the Measure As drop-down and select a data unit to measure in.

10. Click the Display As drop-down and select a unit to display results in.

11. Select the Default allowed for new devices check box to have the plugin poll this indicator type by default when the object type is enabled and when the plugin for a device is enabled.

12. In the Note field, enter any additional information you would like to include.

13. Click Save As New.