Understanding Monitor Mode in Views Other than Service View of Connectivity Services Director

Scope and Monitor Tab Availability

Your current scope—that is, your view and node selection in the View pane—affects which Monitor tabs are available. For example, if you select a router, the RF tab is not available.

The shading of the tabs indicate whether a tab is selected, available, or not available:

• The currently selected tab has dark text on a light background.

• Tabs that are available but not selected have dark text on a dark background.

• Tabs that are not available for your current scope have light text on a light background.

When you enter Monitor mode from another mode, the Summary tab is selected for all scopes. If you have selected a tab and then change scope, the tab remains selected if it is supported in the new scope. If it is not supported in the new scope, Connectivity Services Director selects a default tab for that scope.

Monitors and Tasks

When you click a Monitor tab, the landing page for that tab is displayed, which contains a set of monitors. These monitor enable you to see at a glance important information about the aspect of your network being monitored. For example, the monitors in the Traffic tab present high-level information about the traffic or packets flow in the selected scope.

Detailed information is also available from many monitors when you click the Details icon on the monitor. If the Details icon is not visible in the title bar of a monitor, mouse over the monitor to make it visible. For example, if you click the Details icon from the Current Sessions By Type monitor, you can view detailed information about the current sessions.

In addition to monitors, each tab provides a set of tasks available from the Tasks pane. These tasks enable you to perform additional monitoring functions. Some tasks enable you to view more specialized monitoring data; others enable you to perform an operation, such as pinging a host. For a complete list of tasks available in Monitor mode, see Understanding the Monitor Mode Tasks Pane in Views Other than Service View.

The scope you select affects which monitors are displayed and which tasks are available.

Scope and Data Aggregation

Connectivity Services Director enables you to more than monitor individual devices. It provides a broader network view by aggregating data from devices and making that data available for viewing at higher scopes within the network.

Not all data is aggregated at higher scopes. For example, it does not make sense to provide power supply status at any higher scope than the device itself. Whenever monitors are available at a scope higher than the device scope, however, the data presented is aggregated data from all devices contained in that scope.

How Connectivity Services Director Collects and Displays Monitoring Data

Connectivity Services Director collects monitoring data from all its managed devices at regular intervals known as polling intervals. These polling intervals can vary according to the type of data being collected. Connectivity Services Director sets default polling intervals for each type of data—you can, however, change these polling intervals in Preferences.

The polling intervals are aligned to clock time. For example, if the polling interval is set to 5 minutes, then within every hour, Connectivity Services Director collects data at :00, :05, :10, :15, and so on. If the polling interval is set to 15 minutes, Connectivity Services Director collects data within every hour at :00, :15, :30, and :45.

Connectivity Services Director uses the Juniper Networks Device Management Interface (DMI) to the managed devices to collect the data. If you have a Junos Space fabric, Connectivity Services Director balances the load of polling the managed devices across the nodes in the fabric.

When you display a monitor, the current data is from the last polling interval. Displaying or refreshing a monitor does not trigger Connectivity Services Director to collect data. However, Connectivity Services Director automatically refreshes monitors with new data after a polling interval completes. Each monitor displays the time that the data was last refreshed.

The detail windows for monitors are not automatically refreshed after a polling period completes. You must manually refresh them to obtain new polling data.

How Connectivity Services Director Displays and Stores Trend Data

In addition to displaying current data, Connectivity Services Director also displays historical data in trend graphs so that you can view trends in network performance over time.

When you display a trend graph, you can select the time period over which the data is displayed—usually 1 hour, 8 hours, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, or 1 year. These predefined periods are always relative to the current time and date—that is, if you select a week, the data is from the last 7 days. You can also define a custom time period, which enables you to display data for a period between specific dates and times.

For a trend graph displaying a predefined period of 1 hour, the number of data points depends on the configured polling interval. For periods greater than an hour, the number of data points displayed depends on the time period selected and how Connectivity Services Director consolidates data over time.

To allow storing of monitoring data for a long period of time, Connectivity Services Director consolidates older data. Consolidation involves deriving a single value from a set of shorter term values, generally by averaging the shorter term values, and then using that value as a data point in a longer term data set. After the shorter term data is consolidated into longer term data, it is discarded to save storage space. For example, if a value is polled every 5 minutes, the set of 12 values is consolidated into a single value after an hour has passed. That value then becomes one of the 24 data points that makes up the data set for a day. Similarly, after a day has passed, data is consolidated into one data point that represents that day; after a month has passed, data is consolidated into a one data point that represents that month. Data is not kept for more than a year.

For all trend graphs, Connectivity Services Director will not display data until it has more than two data points to display. This means that after you discover a device, trend data will not appear until three polling periods have passed.

More About the Monitor Tabs

The following sections provide more information about each tab in Monitor mode.

• The Summary Tab
• The Traffic Tab