In this article we will build a Dashboard solution for our Ping MP. You need to have the Data Source installed and configured and aslo our Ping MP to be able to follow this. You also need the plugin Polystat installed.
In the first part of this series of articles we created an Alert pane to display Alerts for the class "Target Host" in our Ping MP. In this article we will now create a new pane which will display the number of instances which is in the three different categories Error, Warning and Success.
1. Start by editing the Dashboard we created in part 1 by click the Edit button.
2. Then press the Add button and choose Visualization.
3. Make sure you have th SCOM Datasource selected for the Query and then press Health.
4. For the Class we choose "Target Host" and for the Instances we choose "*". Then we press Search.
5. We should now have data which we can use for the Visualization and you can check this by change to "Table View" and then you will see the data.
The important parts in this data are the field "Health State" which describes if the instance is in Error, Warnig or Success state.
6. Since we want to count how many instances there is with the diffferent states we have to add a field to this table which we can use for counting. What we will do is add a field with the name "Count" and this is done by a transformation named "Add field from calculation". So go to the Transformations tab and then click on "Add transformation".
7. Choose the "Add field from calculation" transformation.
8. Make sure the Mode is equal to "Reduce row" and that you choose "Count" as calculation.
This will add a column which we can use to count the instances.
9. The next step is to Group this table by the Health State and also calculate how man instances of each Helath state there are. This is done by adding another Transformation named "Group By". Press the button "Add another transformation" at the bottom.
Then choose the transformation "Group by".
To configure this transformation we choose "Group by" on the field "Health State and then "Calculate" and "Total" on the "Count field.
Now we get the count of each Healt State in the data.
10. If we now try to visualize this with a Pie chart by changeing the Visualization to Pie chart (and disable the Table View) we see that it does not show up correctly since the data returned is in wrong format. We want it to display the number of each Health State.
To fix this we need to add yet another transformation that convert the data so it moves the Rows to Fields. This transformation is named "Rows to fields". Go to the transformation tab and click "Add another transformation".
Then choose the "Rows to fields" transformation.
There is no need for any configuration of this transformation and as you can see it has changed the way the data is returned to this.
And if we now look at the Pie chart it looks better.
11. The last part is to configure the colours so it shows Error as Red, Warning as Yellow and Success as green and to add some labels. We start by adding the labels by going to the "Pie chart" section in the panel options. In here we add the labels "Name" and "Value".
Then we scroll down in the panel options to the "Legend" section and add "Value" to the "Legend values".
And now the dashboard looks like this.
To be able to change the colours you need to make sure that you have at least one instance of each Health State (Error, Warning and Success). You can force this by doing override of some monitor (for example Jitter, Response time or Packet Loss). If you don't have one of the instances you won't be able to configure the colour for that instance. To configure the colours we scroll down and add 3 different Field Overrides by pressing the "Add field override button 3 times and choose the option "Fields with name".
We then configure these 3 Overrides according to this picture.
After this the Dashboard will look like this and we have accomplished what we wanted.
You can now Save the Dashboard and reorganize this and the Alert Dashboard according to how you want it.
In part 3 we will add a Polystat dashboard showing the Status of each Instance of the class "Target Host".
Links to all parts