What and why?
A picture paints a thousand words and IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps Topology Manager does just that by showing your resources, their state, how they're related and how they change over time. Topology Manager can store a rich set of data about each resource and that can be used to improve visualisation, resource grouping and right-click tools.
In this AIOps Bitesize, we'll use Topology Manager's tooltip capabilities to provide users with better at-a-glance information about their devices.
Let's Go
We'll use the File Observer to provide the device data for this article by loading a recording from the Network Manager Observer. The File Observer is a popular integration that loads files built by users to describe a topology and is well suited to custom integrations. The Network Manager Observer retrieves network topology data from Network Manager that includes high quality data about devices and their cards and ports, and how the devices are connected to each other. Each Observer other than the File Observer can record what they see to a file that can be loaded using the File Observer, and that's what we'll do here by using a recording from the Network Manager Observer.
Check out the product documentation at these links for this AIOps Bitesize:-
1. Having loaded your data, it's worth finding some example resources and relationships to see what properties are available for use in tooltips. Here's an example of a Cisco device with a rich set of data to choose from and what its default tooltip looks like. Make note of the properties you want to include in tooltips.
2. We've determined that we want device tooltips to include their accessIPAddress, sysContact, model and className if available. Navigate to the Topology viewer -> Topology configuration -> Advanced topology settings and add your property names to the set of Properties required or tooltips or resource/relationship styling and save the changes.
TOP TIP: If a property is present on multiple resource types, it'll automatically get displayed in their tooltips. Topology Manager will also only display properties that have values in tooltips.
3. Now if we hover the mouse pointer over a device, we can see the tooltip includes the extra properties we wanted.
TOP TIP: The set of properties defined for tooltips also apply to relationships. For example, the DNS Observer stores the various properties on its 'resolved' edges and they can be shown in their tooltips by specifying them in the property list.
Final Thoughts
In this AIOps Bitesize, we used Topology Manager's tool tip capabilities to provide users with quick visibility of extra data about devices. You saw how you can simply choose which properties should be displayed in a tool tip and Topology Manager will do the rest. You also learnt how relationships can have their tooltips enhanced to display their properties.
What would your scenario be?