Monitor System and Application Health
The Crosswork Platform is built on an architecture consisting of microservices. Due to the nature of these microservices, there are dependencies across various services within the Crosswork system. The system and applications are considered Healthy if all services are up and running. If one or more services are down, then the health is considered Degraded. If all services are down, then the health status is Down.
From the main menu, choose Crosswork Manager to access the Crosswork Summary and Crosswork Health windows. Each window provides various views to monitor system and application health. It also supplies tools and information that, with support and guidance from your Cisco Customer Experience account team, you can use to identify, diagnose, and fix issues with the Cisco Crosswork cluster, Platform Infrastructure, and installed applications.
While both windows can give you access to the same type of information, the purpose of each summary and view is different.
Monitor Cluster Health
At a glance, the Crosswork Summary window ( ) shows a summary of the overall system health. The main purpose of the Crosswork Summary window is to view Crosswork Cluster health in terms of hardware resources and VMs. For example, prior to installing or upgrading applications, you may want to check if the hardware resources are healthy and the VMs are running well. After clicking the Crosswork Cluster tile, you can visually see resource utilization and drill down on VMs to perform some VM or cluster-related activities. In another case, you may see degrading services or over utilization of hardware resources. At this point, from a hardware point of view, you might find that the number of VMs in the system is insufficient prompting you to add more VMs to scale the system further out. For more information, see Check Cluster Health.
In addition to accessing Crosswork Cluster health, you can click on the Cisco Crosswork Platform Infrastructure and application tiles to view more details such as microservices and alarms.
Monitor Platform Infrastructure and Application Health
The Crosswork Health window ( tab) provides health summaries for the Cisco Crosswork Platform Infrastructure and installed applications with the addition of microservice status details.
Within this window, expand an application row to view Microservice and Alarm information.
From the Microservices tab:
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View the list of microservices and, if applicable, associated microservices by clicking on the microservice name.
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Click to restart or obtain Showtech data and logs per microservice.
Note
Showtech logs must be collected separately for each application.
From the Alarms tab:
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Click the alarm description to drill down on alarm details.
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Change status of the alarms (Acknowledge, Unacknowledge, Clear)
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Add notes to alarms.
You can also download all of a Cisco Crosswork application or Cisco Crosswork Platform Showtech service logs and perform installation-related operations from the Application Details window. Click to open the Application Details window.
Visually Monitor System Functions in Real Time
You can monitor the health of Cisco Crosswork and any of its functions in real time, using a set of monitoring dashboards you can access from the Crosswork Manager window.
Cisco Crosswork uses Grafana to create these dashboards. They give you a graphical view of the product's infrastructure, using metrics collected in its database. You can use these dashboards to diagnose problems you may encounter with individual Cisco Crosswork applications or their underlying services.
There are multiple monitor dashboards, categorized by the type of functionality they monitor and the metrics they provide. The following table lists some categories that may be available depending on whichCisco Crosswork applications are installed.
This dashboard category... |
Monitors... |
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Change Automation |
Playbook functions. Metrics include the number of MOP jobs executed, response latency, API calls, database activity, and so on. |
Optima |
Feature pack, traffic, and SR-PCE dispatcher functions. |
Collection - Manager |
Device-data collection functions. Metrics include telemetry collection latencies, total collection operations, memory and database activity related to telemetry, delayed collections, and so on. |
Health Insights |
Key Performance Indicator functions. Metrics include the number of KPI alerts, API calls, and so on. |
Infra |
System infrastructure messaging and database activity. |
Inventory |
Inventory manager functions. These metrics include total numbers of inventory change activities. |
Platform |
System hardware and communications usage and performance. Metrics include disk and CPU usage, database size, network and disk operations, and client/server communications. |
ZTP |
Zero Touch Provisioning functions. |
To conserve disk space, Cisco Crosswork maintains a maximum of 24 hours of collected metric data.
Grafana is an open-source visualization tool. The following provides general information about how to use the Cisco Crosswork implementation of Grafana. For more information about Grafana itself, see https://grafana.com and http://docs.grafana.org
Procedure
Step 1 |
From the main menu, choose . |
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Step 2 |
At the top right, click View more visualizations. The Grafana user interface appears. |
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Step 3 |
In the Grafana user interface, click Home. Grafana displays the list of monitoring dashboards and their categories, as shown in the following example. |
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Step 4 |
Click the the dashboard you want to view. For example: Clicking on Platform - Summary dashboard displays a view like the one shown in the following figure. |
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Step 5 |
Scroll the dashboard as needed to display all of the metrics it provides, or select any of the functions described in the following table.
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Check System Health Example
In this example, we navigate through the various windows and what areas should be checked for a healthy Crosswork system.
Procedure
Step 1 |
Check overall system health. |
Step 2 |
Check and view detailed information about the microservices that are running as part of the Crosswork Platform Infrastructure. |
Step 3 |
Check and view alarms related to the microservices. |
Step 4 |
View which Crosswork applications are installed. |
Step 5 |
View the status of jobs.
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