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Create a graphical view

The objective of this tutorial is to help you understand how you can provide real time IT infrastructure status overviews with the data presentation extension called Centreon MAP to your ITOM teams and operational users.

With Centreon MAP, you can simply create and share synthetic real time monitoring views to monitor the performance of your IT infrastructure, network, applications and services.

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Example: thanks to this real time views ITOM teams and managers can instantaneously visualise the avalilability of critical business applications and services. This guarantees better reaction time in case of outage and optimises MTRS (Mean Time to Restore Service).

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to create views using Centreon MAP. After reading this article, you will have discovered Centreon MAP main features and you will be able to create views that meet your technical or business users' needs.

Centreon MAP is a Centreon extension that requires a valid license key. To purchase one and retrieve the necessary repositories, contact Centreon.

Create a logical view​

Before creating a view: define the objective​

Define what is the main objective of the view: what need does it meet and who are the recipients, are the main topics to consider before creating a view. Here are some questions you might consider:

  • Who is/are this view recipient(s)? (users' profiles)
  • What level of information do users need?
  • Do I monitor all the resources and indicators I need to create that view?
  • What kind of information should the view contains? (resources, indicators, graphs, network links etc). It can be interesting to start drawing that view on a paper note
  • Now that you have defined the objectives, let's start showing you how to make it.

The view designer's workspace​

Connect to your Centreon MAP server using the desktop client, the following workspace environment appears (empty). To illustrate the explanation, we've opened a view, by default no view is opened.

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Information and area are organized as follow:

  1. Views: existing views that are accessible to you
  2. Element: objects available in opened views
  3. Media: available media (images)
  4. Resources: Centreon's object that you can use in the view (drag & drop)
  5. Content of the view
  6. Palette: graphical elements that you can use in a view
  7. Properties: selected element's properties

Create a new view​

Nothing simpler: right click in the "View" panel and click on "Add"

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With your target view in mind, start creating it by positioning resources, widgets and other elements. Drag & drop and shortcuts will make this time a delightful moment.

Find below an example of an IT infrastructure real time status view created in less ~4 minutes:

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Create a geographical view​

If your IT is geographically spread over a city, country or even the world, you may want to visualize it in the most appropriate way to get insights on your IT infrastruture status.

This can be done easily by using the "GeoView", the only pre-requisites is to have define Geo-coordinates paramaters on your hosts (in the Extended information).

To create a GeoView, Go to Monitoring > Map and click on the "+" that appears on the Geographic view line. If you don't see the "+", it means you don't have enough privileges on Centreon.

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Display & share the view​

Using an access control mechanism based on Centreon ACL objects, it is easy to share the right views to the right teams. As soon as a view has been shared to a user, it is accessible through its browser in Centreon β†’ Monitoring β†’ Map or even directly on a dashboard using the Centreon Map Widget (see example below).

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You now have information to start working on Centreon Map.