Feature Focus: Enterprise Dashboard

The look and feel of the Enterprise Dashboard has been improved for FusionReactor 3.0. It has been re-written as a pure Flex component with additional features including:

• The number of currently queued requests
• Detection when a connection to the server is lost, and an automatic reconnection when the connection is reestablished
• Improved and more detailed two-series graphs
• Two new gauges and graphs showing the JDBC and Request activities

AIR Enterprise Dashboard Now Available!
New for 3.0: The Enterprise Dashboard is now available as a separate Desktop AIR Application. Learn more..

What is the Enterprise Dashboard?

The Enterprise Dashboard lets you track the state of installations on one or more servers. When you install an Enterprise version of FusionReactor it can be queried for its current state. The Enterprise Dashboard lets you instantly monitor the health of ALL of your server instances/machines from a single window.

Seven Gauge and Graph components are visible within the Enterprise Dashboard allowing you to immediately see the state of:

• Memory
• CPU
• Database Activity
• Database Time
• request Activity
• Request Time
• Request Count

These components display statistical information in a visual manner for a better / faster understanding and ease of use.

You can add and monitor servers that are running FusionReactor at any time. You can additionally group machines together to help organize your dashboard. Each individual machine and group is represented by an icon which will change colour to indicate its current health. As well as this, clicking on a server or group will give you its most recent statistics. The dashboard also provides links to each monitored instance so it is a simple job to investigate a server further.

What's more, Enterprise Dashboard can also monitor other servers running J2EE containers, such as Tomcat and JBoss!

Groups

Clicking on a group icon will display all servers within that group. You will also see the Group Information Pane which will display statistics about the group and the servers within it. By default the group icon will be displayed in blue, but if any grouped server is having problems then the color of the icon will change and a small warning panel will be displayed to let you know what the problem is.

Servers

The server icon shows four bars. These bars each have a letter above them (M,C,R,D) to indicate what is being displayed. These bars are:

• Memory (M): represents the amount of memory currently being used by this server.
• CPU (C): represents the amount of CPU time used by this instance since the last CPU value was measured. It is expressed as a percentage of the total CPU time (across all CPU cores) that was available during that period.
• Request Time (R): represents the average request time on this server over the last 60 seconds.
• DB Time (D): represents the average time spent on DB operations in the last 60 seconds.

Clicking on a server icon will display the Server Information Pane which will display statistics about the server. By default the server icon will be displayed in blue, but if there are any problems with the server then the colour of the icon will change and a small warning panel will be displayed to let you know what the problem is. Additionally, there are two small buttons on the Server icon:

• At the top right corner of the icon is a small button which can be used to flip a server between Online and Offline status (depending on the set User Rights). An offline server will be displayed in gray and will not cause warnings to appear within the Enterprise Dashboard.
• At the bottom right corner of the icon is a small arrow. If you click on this arrow then you will be taken directly to the instance of FusionReactor running on this server.

Flexible Alerting?

One of the great features of the Enterprise Dashboard is that you can set warning and critical status levels for many of the server metrics being monitored. With your threshold values entered, the machines will now visually attract your attention when something is wrong.

When FusionReactor detects a problem on a monitored server it will light up one or more "Warning Lights" on the server cube. You can mouse over a warning light to see a tool tip explaining the problem in more detail.

How Do I Add Machines?

There are three ways to add servers to your Enterprise Dashboard: Firstly, you can import servers from your Instance Manager. Secondly, you can get FusionReactor to scan its machine for servers, or you can simply insert the URL of your server into the Manage Servers page.

From here you can also add scripts to a server, delete, modify or check the current status of existing server. If you have any groups defined then they will appear here so you can easily assign your servers into them.

What If My Server Shuts Down?

As well as displaying this information within the Enterprise Dashboard, FusionReactor can also be configured to email you when a server shuts down and (optionally) on start-up as well.

Crash Protection Scripts

The Enterprise Dashboard allows you to add arbitrary scripts that can be automatically launched if a monitored server within the dashboard cannot be contacted (there is no connection available) making it easy to develop scripts for use with for example, Crash Protection.

Servers can be added to the Enterprise Dashboard as "watchdogs" to monitor (local servers) and cross-monitor (distributed servers) other servers setup within the Enterprise Dashboard, checking their availability and restarting them (by executing a script) if they become unavailable.

The ability to add Crash Protection Scripts is a powerful functionality leading to an increase of server availability in both local and distributed server environments. Read more...