Glossary

A - C - D - E - F - G - I - M - N - P - R - S - T - W

Glossary of Terms

A

account

Before using the platform, create an account within your organization. Your organization has a partner account accessed with a URL like https://{my-organization}.app.opsramp.com. A partner is the master tenant, including clients who each have an account. A user can have one and only one account within a partner or client domain. Settings such as alert escalation can be specified depending on a user is a partner-level or client-level user.

agent

An agent is a low-footprint, secure application that runs on managed Linux and Windows servers. It manages server, desktop, and laptop devices. Agent features and functionality include:

• Discovery and deployment
• Asset collection and proactive jobs
• Scripts/automation
• Monitoring templates for Windows and Linux Agents
• RBA definition
• Applications monitor support
• Patch management, with Microsoft and WSUS policies
• Application dashboards

Agent deployment scenarios:

• Communicate directly to the OpsRamp Cloud
• Communicate to the OpsRamp Cloud through the gateway
• Communicate to the OpsRamp cloud through a customer-owned proxy server, such as squid proxy

Agent connectivity:

• Uses outgoing TCP/443 for API server and for Connection Grid to be opened in customer firewalls to communicate to the OpsRamp Cloud Platform.
• Sends data over secure TLS socket using Google protocol buffers.
• Connects to the API server using an OAUTH2 authentication using a client-specific key:secret pair.
• Receives a unique access token as a response to the OAUTH2 authentication, which is used to authenticated subsequent communication.

alert/alerting

An alert is the processed entity generated from events detected by monitors. Template-based monitoring uses templates that define metrics assigned to resources, setting alert conditions on the metrics. An event can generate a new alert or add to an existing alert.

Alert management involves alert creation and update, alert correlation, alert first response, and alert escalation lifecycle states.

alert correlation

Identify and group related alerts, using time window-based rules and ML:

• Use continuous learning and seed files to detect alert sequences.
• Leverage discovery topology.
• Leverage alert similarity

alert escalation

Notify users or create an incident for an alert.

auto-monitoring

Auto-monitoring automatically collects metrics as part of resource discovery, instrumentation, and monitoring. As an alternative to template-based monitoring, it is one-click monitoring that requires the user to deploy only a gateway, agent, or API integration, and metric collection begins immediately, reducing the time from discovery to metrics ingestion.

Also, standardized metric naming conventions provide a consistent user experience and metric collection is decoupled from alerting by not using a template-based approach to monitoring.

C

client

A client is a sub-tenant of a partner. A partner can create client users and can access all clients in the account. The role of a client user is restricted to a specific client. Types of client users in an organization:

• Regular User: A user that has complete access privileges.
• Business User: A user with fewer access privileges.

D

dashboard

Partner-level and client-level dashboards provide a unified view of the availability and performance of infrastructure assets. Using a dashboard, you can drill deeper into infrastructure elements to gain a greater understanding of the state of the infrastructure. In addition to out-of-the-box dashboards, you can create and share dashboards.

The classic dashboard uses widgets to display charts suitable for the data they represent. Predefined dashboards are provided and you can also create custom dashboards. Partner and client dashboards provide different viewing capabilities. The default partner dashboard is own by the partner administrators and is visible to everyone. Default client dashboards are owned by the client administrator and can only be viewed by client users.

The dashboard permits you to view assets by:

• type:

  • server
  • hypervisor
  • network
  • database

• business unit:

  • lines of business

• location

  • cloud region
  • data centers
  • branch office

• business services

• application service

  • dashboard service maps map infrastructure elements to your business service and track services against business goals.

Curated Dashboards are out-of-the-box dashboards preconfigured to give you instant visibility into the health of popular services or resources. Curated dashboards can be copied and used as a starting point to create custom dashboards.

Dashboard controls include:

• Time interval selection for viewing a data window
• Dashboard refresh
• View customization

device

See resource

discovery

Discovery involves finding the enterprise resources you want to monitor. These include:

• Servers
• Storage devices
• Networks
• Virtual machines
• Services hosted on public clouds
• Containers
• Synthetics
• Applications

Discovery involves:

• Defining the devices you want to discover as a discovery profile.
• Scanning for the resources in the discovery profile. Scans can be done manually or on a periodic schedule.

discovery profile

A discovery profile is a list of devices that you want to discover. You can specify agent- or gateway-based discovery. Multiple discovery profiles can be created that have different device sets.

E

escalation

Escalation involves user alert notification and routing that generates an incident ticket. Notification and routing decisions are device- and alert-dependent. Some escalation policies result in incident ticket generation.

event

A monitor generates an event on detection of a predefined condition. Event processing creates a new alert or adds to an existing alert.

Event management involves:

• Event aggregation
• Event de-duplication
• Event suppression to permanently suppress unwanted alerts using first response policies
• Event correlation

F

first response

Automatically suppress or run process automation as the first step in handling an alert.

G

gateway

A gateway is a virtual machine that manages devices such as:

• Network infrastructure, including switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, and appliances
• Storage infrastructure
• Virtual environment
• Applications, including COTS, Weblogic, and Websphere

group

The concept of groups or grouping is provided as a resource management convenience for administrators to perform bulk transactions on multiple resources or entities.

Anything can be grouped that has similarities and might want to be treated together, including resources and applications. Grouped items can then be conveniently operated on when assigning permissions or roles, for example.

Entities can be grouped automatically or manually. Groups can also be nested with no limit on the number of nesting levels.

See resource group

I

incident

An incident represents a critical issue, which might have a greater impact than a discrete event. Incidents are created as part of alert escalation when intervention is required to restore the required level of service. The Event and Incident Management product package must be enabled for the partner or client to manage incidents.

inference model

The inference model uses correlation techniques to categorize and assess the significance of events:

• topology-based correlation, which correlates the relationship between IT services and the underlying infrastructure.
• clustering-based correlation, which uses event aggregation based on event attributes to analyze similarities and correlate multiple events into a single event. Typically, this correlates alerts that share similar properties or event attributes, reducing noise.
• co-occurrence-based correlation, which analyzes sequence patterns in existing alerts. This consolidates and identifies the root cause using machine learning algorithms.

integration

An integration connects to an external application or service to enhance core capabilities and exchange data, including metrics of monitored systems. Integrations can be implemented using a REST API, Webhook, or email ingestion.

M

metric

A metric is a raw data element that provides information about the availability, performance, and capacity of IT services, including servers, applications, storage, and networks. Metrics provide insight into the current health of the IT infrastructure.

monitor/monitoring

Monitoring is a method for periodically querying resources and forwarding resource metrics to the platform for processing and analysis. Monitors gather information and track resource performance.

As part of the onboarding process:

• All resources in the network are discovered and managed.
• Monitoring templates are assigned to monitor resources according to the configured metrics, or auto-monitoring is used.
• Alerts are raised to prompt action to remediate the alert condition.

Monitor data collection mechanisms include:

• ICMP
• SNMP with MIBs
• WMI classes and perfmon counters
• Traps and syslog events
• SMI-S
• Storage elements
• CLI custom scripts
• REST and SOAP API
• Synthetic transactions
• JMX

Template-based monitoring uses templates to specify what metrics are collected, the collection frequency, and alerting thresholds.

Auto-monitoring, as an alternative to template-based monitoring, monitors metrics predefined for well-known resources. Auto-monitoring parameters such as thresholds and frequency can also be configured.

monitoring template

See template

N

notification

A notification informs administrators of an escalation that requires action. Notifications provide information and insights for an actionable event that is derived from policy-driven rules on a set of resources. Administrators can respond to the action items using one of the notification channels:

• by email for all notification types
• by SMS for alerts only
• by voice for alerts only

P

partner

A partner is the top-level tenant of your OpsRamp account in the tenant hierarchy that includes clients and users.

patch management

Patch management helps maintain infrastructure compliance for Windows and Linux environments by keeping devices updated with the latest available patches. The following patch categories are supported:

• Security and Critical
• Definition Updates
• Feature Packs
• Service Packs
• Updates
• Update Rollups

permission set

Permission sets restrict the operation or set of operations that can be performed by a user or user group, according to the permission values assigned to each permission type.

R

remote console

Secure, remote access is supported to managed devices, using a browser console, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), Secure Shell (SSH) with Public Key, Secure Shell (SSH), and Telnet. Remote access sessions are recorded and available for playback.

reports

The reporting feature enables users to create and download reports from multiple, predefined templates or generate customized reports. These include:

• Ad-hoc reports
• Scheduled and recurring reports
• Predefined, best-practice templates for report generation across multiple modules of IT Operations Management

resource

A resource is an application, service, or device in your IT infrastructure uniquely identified by the following attributes:

• IP address and MAC Address on the default route subnet IP address & Associated MAC Address pairs for all network interface cards.
• Instance name configured on the Infrastructure.
• Hostname configured in the operating system.
• DNS name configured in the network.
• Serial number configured by the vendor.
• Management Object ID defined by the management software.
• Possible additional inventory properties.

resource group

A logical grouping of resources based on application, workload, location, or type. Resource groups provide for efficient resource management by grouping resources with the same device management policy or alert correlation policy, for example. When a resource is discovered, resource attributes can be used to automatically add the resource to a resource group.

See group

role

A role defines user access permissions for a resource. Roles are created depending on how an administrator wants to control resource access in the organization. The administrator role is the highest level that can access and control resources.

Role-based Access Control (RBAC)

RBAC permits administrators to restrict resource access according to user roles and permissions. Using privileges, you can assign privileged roles to any user account to maintain the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of a resource.

roster

A roster is a list of users associated with schedule duties.

S

service map

A service map models business and application services on the infrastructure on which they are hosted. They provide visibility into services and the resources on which the services depend. You can assign KPIs and health indicators to the components involved in the service. Service maps can be created from the discovered topology.

Represented as a hierarchy of relationships, you define rules that associate parent nodes with child nodes. Service Map automatically tracks service impacts based on the rules. You define rules knowing:

• service dependencies.
• the topological impact of service or application faults.

T

template

Templates are used in template-based monitoring. A template provides a specification of how to monitor the resource and the metrics to monitor. Agents and gateways monitor the following resource types:

• Agent-based template

  • Compute Infrastructure, Windows, and Linux metrics
  • Operating system metrics
  • Application metrics
  • Custom workload metrics
  • Logfiles
  • Service and process metrics

• Gateway-based template for network elements

  • Switches
  • Routers
  • Load balancers
  • UPS
  • Appliances
  • Storage infrastructure
  • Agentless monitoring

Templates are also provided to monitor public cloud services.

tenant/tenancy

The concept of tenancy provides the capability to create independent management domains of management, known as tenants. Each tenant equates to a logical container of managed resources. The role of every tenant user is restricted resources and activities defined for the tenant.

topology

Topology is a representation of connected resources in the IT infrastructure.

topology explorer

The topology explorer feature helps navigate and understand the architecture of discovered applications, data services, and technologies. The main source of topology discovery is network protocols, such as SNMP, CDP, and LLDP, and Agents.

topology map

A topology map provides a visualization of your infrastructure. You can interact with the topology map to explore and discover additional information about infrastructure resources.

W

widget

The classic dashboard uses widgets to display charts suitable for the data they represent. You can configure widgets display attributes and choose from various chart styles.

Acronyms and abbreviations