Business Services
Introduction
In a nutshell, Business Services is a tool for availability monitoring of logical services. Company email, web site, server farm, call center - all are examples of logical services. Moreover, the services can be combined together to define a "broader" logical service. Company email, web site, name server and firewall all can be referred to as "Company Internet Services" and monitored for availability as a whole. So if the name server goes down then the "Company Internet Services" do not function properly as a whole. This feature can be used both for internal QA and external Service Level Agreement (SLA) monitoring.
Services, node links, service checks
Service
Business Services represented with a tree-like hierarchy of nested logical services, nodes and service checks. One can think of a service as a container consisting of other services, service checks and nodes linked to service checks. In NetXMS terminology the last is called node link. For each service in the hierarchy, NetXMS calculates availability percentage and keeps track of all downtime cases. To check availability at any particular level, select it in the Object Browser or choose Availability Chart from the context menu.
Node link
Node link is a reference to any node with one or more service checks attached to this node.
Service check
Service check is a test whose result is used to define the state of the service. A service check may belong to the specific node (node link) or directly to the service. A service check object contains NXSL script which either returns success (the test result ok) or failure (the service has failed). There are the following special variables and constants which can be used in NXSL scripts for service checks:
- $node - points to the current node the check is being executed for
- $reason - the script may set the reason of failure
- OK - constant, indicates success
- FAIL - constant, indicates failure
Service check templates
To avoid redefinition of the same service check multiple times (for multiple nodes) you can create service check templates. The principle behind service check template is very similar to Data Collection Templates. There are two notable differences though:
- A service check template is always applied automatically to every new node (node link) added to the service
- A service check template is applied to nodes in the current level in the service tree and in all levels below
Configuration and usage
Use Business Service container in the Object Browser view.
To define a new service select Create business service... from the context menu in Object Browser, and enter the service name. Then under newly created service you may want to define other services, checks or node links. You can examine or alter properties of the service. The propeties dialog is similar to other objects (such as Node):
If your service check relies on specific nodes then you need to create node links by selecting Create node link... from the context menu:
One or more service checks must be defined for every node link. Service check can be also defined at a business service level. In the latter case it is not connected to any particular node and can be used for some general calculations (e.g. based on some server stats). To create a check select Create service check... from the context menu, enter the check name and navigate to Script tab in object properties:
Every service check must have the non empty Check script text area, otherwise the check will not work.