Widgets

Initial Creation of Widgets

When viewing the Dashboards and Reports section for the first time, it will be empty. You can create a default dashboard by clicking Create dashboard. For further details please refer to the steps in the Creating and Editing Dashboards section.

Widget Detail

Each widget can be adjusted by:

• Resizing the widget

• Changing the position of the widget

• Changing the widget data selection

Clicking the setting icon opens an additional menu, which consists of:

• Edit widget - Displays the widget settings dialog. This dialog can be used to modify widget settings. For more details see the section on adding a new widget below.

• Reload widget - Refreshes the widget immediately. Apart from immediate (on-demand) refresh, all widgets in the dashboard are refreshed periodically after a set interval. This interval can be changed in the widget header (for a specific widget) or in the dashboard upper menu (the default interval for all widgets in the dashboard).

• Reset to default view - Restores default widths of columns in the displayed table.

• Remove widget - Removes the widget from the dashboard.

Clicking the magnifier icon opens a new browser tab displaying current widget data in its parent module. In the parent module, you can take any further actions to analyze the data.

Adding New Widgets

You can add a new widget by clicking Add widget.

You can use this dialog to add a new widget or change the settings of the existing widget. The dialog consists of five main groups of settings:

• Category

• Data to display

• Widget name

• Data range

• Widget settings

Category selection

Displays a list of categories (modules) that offer the widgets which can be added to the dashboard.

Data to display selection

This selection is populated in accordance with the content of the Category selection. You can select the data endpoints available for the respective category.

Widget name

Used to customize the widget name. The default value is the same as the Data to display selection.

Data range

Defines the interval for which the data will be displayed. By default, this option uses the general time interval (available in the top-right corner).

It is possible to select the following data range:

• Last hour

• Last 2 hours

• Last 4 hours

• Last 12 hours

• Last 24 hours

• Last 2 days

• Last 4 days

• Last 7 days

• Last 2 weeks

• Last 4 weeks

• Last 3 months

Widget settings

Each data endpoint offers various kinds of data. The dashboards offer one or more widget types that are the most suitable for visualizing such data.

Each widget may be composed of various elements:

• Table

• Pie chart

• Time series chart

Depending on the selected category, displayed data, and selected widget type, these elements can be enabled or disabled.

Widget Settings Detail

Different types of widgets are represented by a variety of interactive icons. You can turn on/off a visualization by clicking the respective icon.

Sample widget icon:

Selecting a widget type allows you to configure further settings:

Pie chart

• Metric - allows you to choose one of the available metrics, which will serve as a base for the pie chart. The metric is also presented in the table which serves as a chart legend.

• Chart description - allows you to label the pie chart slices with one of the available parameters. The parameter consists of the description of the respective metric.

• Summaries - contains a list of all available summary values that are present in the data endpoint of a pie chart. Any of the summary values can be selected to be displayed in the chart.

Summary pie chart

• Metric - allows you to choose one of the available metrics, which serves as a base for the pie chart. The metric is also represented in the form of a number in the table which serves as a chart legend.

• Summaries - contains a list of all available summary values that are present in the data endpoint of a pie chart. Any of the summary values can be selected to be displayed in the chart.

Table

• Show colors - if enabled, an extra column containing a color legend is added to the table.

• Show percents - some widget types support showing percentage values in the table.

• Columns - contains a list of all available table columns that are present in the chapter. You can select any of the columns to be displayed in the table.

• Summaries - contains a list of all available summary table rows that are present in the chapter. You can select any of the rows to be displayed in the table.

• Show virtual links - if enabled, the table will include virtual links defined in the topology.

Time series chart

• Series - contains a list of all time series that are present in the data endpoint. You can select any list of them to display in the chart.

• Stacked chart - displays time series stacked on top of each other.

• Axis - allows you to choose between the linear and logarithmic axis.

Summary

• Columns - contains a list of all columns, which consist of different types of available information, that are present in the chapter. You can select any of the columns to be displayed.

Topology visualization

• Opacity - for topologies you can set the opacity for the map. It is available for the map type topology only.

Data settings

• Depending on a data endpoint, other data search parameters might be available for configuration

• The settings are displayed in a table containing the following columns:

  • Name - name of the parameter

  • Show in the widget - if checked, input field to set the parameter value will be displayed in the widget

  • Use default - if checked, default values will be used

  • Custom value

    • if the "use default" is not checked, a custom value will be used instead

    • depending on the data endpoint, each parameter can accept either a value from the allowed list displayed in a select box or an arbitrary value

Displayed interval adjustment

If data is not available for the entire selected time interval of a top chapter, the time interval shown is adjusted to match the available data and a notification is displayed in the widget's footer on a dashboard or chapter's header in a report.

This can occur when:

• Data for the selected time interval was not collected, either because there was an issue, or the data collector was not available at that point in time.
• Computation of data for the selected chapter has not finished yet.
• The selected time interval is smaller than the granularity of available chapter data (for example, requesting 1 hour of data when only 1 day granularity is available). Refer to profile types for more details.

Status widgets

Connected sources

This widget represents connected nodes like “networks” or sources of the flow data. A source is considered to be connected if some data was received from it within the previous 5-minute interval. The widget color signals how many sources are connected:

• Green - everything works well (>= 75% sources connected)
• Yellow - minor issues detected (< 75% sources connected)
• Orange - major issues detected (< 50% sources connected)
• Red - critical issues detected (< 25% sources connected)

Security status

The security status is represented by a shield showing different colors as per the selected perspective and events within that perspective in the Flowmon ADS. The number of events in the highest detected category is also shown. The status of a widget is manifested by a color:

• Green - no events or information level events detected
• Yellow - low priority events detected
• Orange - medium priority events detected
• Light red - high-priority events detected
• Dark red - critical events detected

The “Show details” section provides names of the perspective and the number of events in individual levels of severity.

Application status

The application status widget is based on the APM Index calculated for all applications within the selected time frame. It requires Flowmon APM. The overall status represents a weighted average for monitored applications. So if some applications have a very poor APM index, but the number of transactions is low, it does not necessarily affect the overall status. Four different colors represent different values of the APM Index:

• Green - everything is OK, index > 90
• Yellow - minor issues, index > 80
• Orange - major issues, index > 70
• Red - critical situation, index <=70

Topology Widget

All topologies can be used as widgets on a dashboard or as chapters in a report. You can visualize a topology as a table of links or as a map. Both can be exported as a PDF report. When exporting into a CSV, the map visualization is converted to a table.

To quickly edit the topology from a widget, click the gear (⚙) icon in the top-right corner of a widget and click Edit topology.

You can zoom in or out in the topology widget by using the buttons in the bottom-left corner, or by using a combination of Ctrl + mouse wheel (for Windows/Linux users) or ⌘ + mouse wheel (for macOS users).

In a topology table widget, clicking the link's name, source node, or destination node displays this context menu:

• Link detail — See overview information about the link's traffic alongside data charts for the selected time span of the report or widget.

• Edit link — Edit the link in the same way you would in the Topology editor.

• Copy to clipboard — Copy the value (for example, the link name) to your clipboard.

• Open in Analysis — Open the underlying data profile in the Flowmon Monitor Center Analysis for further investigation.

In a topology map widget, clicking a link also opens the Link detail:

Historical Trends Widget

Historical Trends provide a comparison between the current traffic from the selected interval and its values from the same day and time from previous weeks. You can select the type of data you want to display (Packets, Bytes or Flows) and what channels you want to see. The table shows numerical averages for the displayed period and their comparison, in addition to their 95th percentile.

• 95th Percentile — The highest value remaining after the top 5% of a data set is removed (95% of your traffic is lower than this value).

• Average — Average of all traffic in the selected time interval and dataset.

• X Compared to Y (Absolute value) — $(aY - aX)$ where

  • $(aY)$ - Average of all traffic in the selected time interval and dataset for Y.
  • $(aX)$ - Average of all traffic in the selected time interval and dataset for X.

• X Compared to Y (Percentage) — $(1 - (aX/aY))$