Glossary of terms

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A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | M | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

This contains a list of the terms as they apply to Veloopti

1 A

Action: A binary executable file that runs locally on a computer with a Veloopti Agent installed. See Actions for more articles.

With two Actions Luke ran 'apt-get install sl' on all Debian computers and 'yum -y install sl' on all Redhat Linux computers. Now he just had to wait for someone to get the wrong directory.

Agent controller: The point at which data from Veloopti Agents is received into the Veloopti SaaS instance. See Agent controller for more articles.

The agent controller was located in Australia and all agents around the world sent their data there.

Aggregation Aggregation is the process in which information is gathered and then viewed in a summary form

Data aggregation within the healthcare industry means taking many different pieces of data (health information, finances, lab results, etc.) and putting them all together in one place to create a single unified data asset. With all the data in one place, one can then process through large amounts of it simultaneously to create insights, trends, and predictions.

Alert: If the Event requires human intervention then it is raised to an Alert. All relivent details regarding the Event are gathered and the appropriate person is notified of the Alert.

API A method that allows data to be sent to Veloopti through a Veloopti agent.

Even sending a million data points per hour through the API didn't impact the computer all that much.

Application: A logical grouping of actions, nodes, dashboards, policies and users to make it easy to monitor your applications.

Application category: There are 7 categories that can be configured within an application: Actions; Nodes; Dashboards; Permissions (Currently not available); Policies; Roles and Users.

Argument: An exchange of words between people with diametrically opposed views who communicate asynchronously.

The argument between Linux and Windows administrators as to which is best was heard by everyone in the building

Arguments: A command-line argument is the information that follows the binary executable files name on the command line of the operating system. Command-line arguments are used to pass information to the program. For example, when you use a script interpreter, you probably want to specify the name of the file you want to run after the name of the script program.

"C:\Windows\System32\cscript.exe //B D:\scripts\EjectCDdrive.vbs" and "D: & cd D:\scripts & cscript //B EjectCDdrive.vbs" essentially did the same thing - annoy James who wondered why his CD tray kept ejecting!

Assigned When a policy is deployed to a node is is assigned to that node.

Rahul moved the development Apache web policies into the production policy group that automatically assigned them to the Apache web computers

2 B

Breach duration: The time window during which an event storm rule severity breach (information, warning or exception) must be met.

The breach duration for a severity of exception was set to 12 hours which meant that the event storms were detected over a long period of time.

Breadcrumbs: A navigation scheme that remembers the order of web pages that you previous viewed. Breadcrumbs contain both static links and drop down list boxes (see below).

Using the breadcrumbs Mathias was able to view the node and then navigate up to the node group.

And Hansel said to Gretel: "Let us drop these bread crumbs so that together we find our way home".

Breadcrumb navigation drop down: The drop down list boxes that appear in the application view of the breadcrumbs that allow for quick selection of applications or application configuration categories.

Sarah was easily able to select an action from any application by changing the application breadcrumb and not moving the action one.

Bubble: A visual indication that a user has received a Task or a Message.

The bubble let Johnny know that there was a task for the server administrators to perform.

3 C

Circular reasoning: Something that most people in IT use to show their superiority. See circular reasoning

Clone: Exactly duplicates the policy or action in all ways except for the name. The action or policy is exactly recreated and placed in the same groups that it resides in. The only difference is in the name in that a number in brackets is increment from 1 at the end.

Melissa made a clone of the "Ping" action called "Ping (1)" which was in the 4 action groups that Ping was in.

Computer: You don't know what a computer is and yet you're using Veloopti?

Context options: Things that can be performed on multiple selected items (nodes, policies, users and events) in the Results Panel.

George changed all of the root passwords once per week by selecting them and using the 'Action' context option on the DVL linux distros as this was company policy.

Custom event properties: Properties of an event that are in addition to the base ones provided by Veloopti.

4 D

Dashboard: The left most menu item on the Veloopti GUI. See Dashboard for more articles.

David started with the dashboard menu item to determine what was going on with his application.

Drill down: Refers to the process of viewing data at a increased level of detail (see Roll up)

As a result, the average CIO can drill down to the tiniest operational detail but focusing too tightly on small details can lead to bad decision making.

5 E

Event: A detectable or discernible occurrence that has relevance to the management of the IT Infrastructure which is observed and logged into Veloopti. See Event for more articles.

Every time someone used the sudo command on a Linux computer an event was recorded in Veloopti.

Event Path: See Path

Event Severity: ITIL Standard categorisation based on the significance of an event: Information; Warning or Exception.

After receiving 20 events for the same computer every day for a week with the event category of exception, Jack decided that it was time to do something about it.

Event Status: Signifies whether the event is in a currently open or closed state.

The backup failure event had been open for 15 days which is probably why Ted was worried when the computer blue screened.

Event storm: Event storms occur when a single or large number of nodes throughout the enterprise generate many events within a small period of time.

After they received one million SMTP trap events it triggered the event storm rule that stopped them from seeing more events. At this point Mildred though she probably could have set the threshold a little lower.

6 F

Feedback: The area of the Veloopti web GUI that shows feedback from the Veloopti application.

The spinny icon was showing that events were still loading. It was at this point in time that Fred was questioning her wisdom in selecting so many of them.

Filter: Used to restrict or expand the events in the result panel.

After Bob filtered out all of the Exchange events for the node there was nothing to be seen.

Filter toggle: A toggle that hides and reveals the filter selection from view.

Janet always hid the filter so there was more screen real estate for the events.

Financial Administrator: The user who pays the Veloopti invoice for the organisation at the end of the month.

7 G

Granularity: Data granularity refers to how many data points are stored for a metric for a particular period time i.e. one every second; one every five minutes, etc..

The electricity bill total doesn't provide sufficient granularity to know how much was consumed on Tuesday the 10th of May.

Global options: Icons that represent an action independent to the items in the results pane.

On the users view one of the global options is to add a new user.

Graph: A graphical representation of data in which the data is represented by dots joined together with lines.

There were three graphs on the dashboard.

Group: A group is a hierarchical collection of items that are arranged together to enable the easy management of the items that it contains.

• Node Group: contains nodes
• Policy Group: contains policies
• User Group: contains users
• Action Group: contains actions. Action groups are not hierarchical.

Julie ran the 'reboot server' action on the 'Windows server' node group.

9 I

Item options: A three dot menu menu of things that can be performed on the selected item.

One of Esme's most used item options is to run the reboot action for a computer.

12 L

Logs: Also called audit logs. Whenever a task, action or change is made to Veloopti a log is written that can be viewed later. See Logs for more articles.

The only thing stopping Ben from continually changing Rebecca's name to Reboota was the fact that there was a log visible afterwards.

13 M

Main menu: The menu that runs across the top of the webpage

The Google website lacks a main menu and is one of the few website to do so.

Metric: A series of numbers that are used to measure and track the status of an IT component. Metrics appear inside of a graph. Metric

The metrics that was being collected for the election was showing that not all of the voters were unique.

14 N

Network device: A network router, switch or other device that is managed using SNMP

The network device was rebooting every hour, but nobody knew because it was redundant.

Node: Either a computer or a network device. See Node for more articles.

The Gargoyle router has a Linux OS and is a node that can have a Veloopti agent installed on it.

Notification: Whenever an event informs someone that it has occurred, either through email or SMS. See Notification for more articles.

I liked to receive a notification every time that Rowan logged on because more often than not the computer rebooted afterwards.

15 O

Object: An distinct item in Veloopti that has properties; i.e. a node, policy, user or event.

Organisation: Nodes that are grouped together into a single entity. The entity has users who are given permissions over the things that Veloopti make available. Each Organisation is limited to a single invoice per billing cycle. See Organisation for more articles.

After looking at the Apache web servers for Ford Motor Company, Edith then switched organisations to look at Mazda's.

Outage: The suppression of notifications during specific time windows. See Outage for more articles.

After Dan received another notification that the backup server was rebooted during the night he thought that it was high time to put the node into outage during that time so he wouldn't get woken up again.

16 P

Path: A string of numbers and letters separated with one or more full stops "." that represent the metric or event and its related hierarchy. Also called a dot notation.

The path of the event was: "api.webpages.homepage.aboutus.pageload" which meant that the About Us web page was having issues.

Password: Series of letters and numbers usually written on a post-it note and stuck on a monitor but system administrators memorise with ease.

I was going to change my password to milkycoffee but apparently that’s too weak

Permission: A permission is authorisation to perform an operation on a specific object, such as an application or node. Permissions are divided into two types; global or application.

Policy: A policy is a set of instructions to be performed by a Veloopti agent that are configured in the Veloopti GUI and sent to one or many agents to be actioned on a schedule. See Policy for more articles.

The monitoring policy was detecting that a firewall was blocking access to the back-end server - yet it was working yesterday.

Primary Navigation:

Property: An attribute of an item in Veloopti that distinguishes it from another.

All of the application servers were built with the name 'localhost' so using the hostname to distinguish them was meaningless.

18 R

Recursive: see recursive

Results panel: The box on the right hand side of the Veloopti web GUI that is populated depending upon the menu item selected.

Clicking on the events menu item populates individual events into the results panel.

Roll up refers to the process of viewing data with decreasing detail (see Drill down)

When viewing one month of data the one minute data was rolled up into five minute increments.

19 S

Server: An operating system instance that provides services to other servers or computers.

An operating system instance is called a server and applications running on it provide services to other computers/devices.

Severity: Standard categorisation based on the significance of an event: information, warning or exception.

It was only when the event severity turned to exception that Barry decided to look at it, but by then it was too late.

Sidebar Navigation:

Status: Each event is either in the open or closed state which is called a status. See also State

The "node down" event had a closed status which means that it had come back up again.

Subscription: A billing term.

20 T

Task: Something that a user must perform to permit further functionality in Veloopti. See Task for more articles.

After the agent was installed the task to approve the node in the organisation was required.

Threshold breach: When a metric goes above the parameters set in the policy.

Triage Circuit: A collection of commands that run in a policy when a threshold breach or condition match is detected

Triage circuits are yet to be implemented in Veloopti and everyone is waiting for them

21 U

User: A person with a valid logon to Veloopti and access your organisation. See User for more articles.

There were twenty five Veloopt users in the organisation and fortunately there was no cost to adding more

22 V

Veloopti Agent: A software executable written by Veloopti that runs on a operating system and performs monitoring of the computer. See Agent for more articles.

Peter installed the Veloopti agent onto his Linux media computer at home.

Veloopti Agent Sentinel: A software component that runs on a operating system and monitors the Veloopti Agent.

After detecting that the Veloopti Agent was consuming too much CPU it was stopped bu the Veloopti agent sentinel.

Veloopti console: The web front end that users logon to to view their Veloopti monitoring information.

Alexa logged onto Veloopti console to see how her applications were performing.

View options: Changes the results panel from viewing the items in either a compressed list view, item expanded list view or group view.

Ruby noticed that the uncompressed view didn't show as many items on one page so she changed to the compressed view using the view options.

Virtual command prompt: A command/terminal session on a computer that can be initiated from the node. You will be prompted for a username/password combination that has rights on the computer and the session will have the same rights as the username/password combination.

The Virtual command prompt is the most eagerly anticipated capability of Veloopti.