NETWAYS Blog

Sometimes monitoring can drag you down in the jumble of individual hosts and service states, when really all you want to know is if the entire application or business process is healthy. That’s where the Business Process Addons come in handy and now ever more than before. At the recent OSMC 2010, Chief Developer Bernd Stroßenreuther announced his latest improvements to the Business Process Addons – greater visualisation of business process relationships and their configuration.

To do this, he teamed up with Jannis Mosshammer and integrated Business Process Addons into Icinga Web. Via a custom API between Icinga Core and Web, they made good use of the dynamic GUI to create 2 cronks for the existing Business Process View addon. An improvement on the old summary table of processes, the new overview cronk displays processes arranged as a tree directory. With ‘and’ / ‘or’ relationships, priorities, related hosts and services all per process all simultaneously in view, the tree view lets you keep an eye on the bigger picture while clicking into more detail. This drill down feature is useful especially when troubleshooting, to see which processes are affecting others.

In addition, Bernd and Jannis added a new event history feature, which pops in and out on the right column to give more detail on each process without leaving the overview tab. Flexibility was also built in, so that other tabs beyond events such as performance graphs, CMDB contact persons, views of all business processes that contain the same services, etc. can be added as needed.
The second cronk is an editor for click based business process configurations creation and modification. Also arranged in a tree structure, existing services or entire processes can be modified, dragged and dropped into other business processes, and new ones created in drop down menus. This is all done with the overall structure in view, so that all changes and their related effects per defined priority can be immediately seen in the greater business process configuration. Compared to the previous text based editor, this is a big step up in user friendliness and configuration clarity.

Since the announcement at OSMC, the Business Process View integration for Icinga is now delivered with the latest Icinga Web, and will be renamed to Business Process Addons for Nagios and Icinga in the near future. We recommend it all who need to keep an eye on SLAs, keep services running smoothly and prefer to see their monitoring from a process perspective. From what we hear, the Business Impact Analysis should be coming soon. We’ll keep you in the loop!