For each device listed in the Device List (on the left side of the main window), you can manually configure scan parameters, to fine tune data acquisition. You can easily identify which devices are active or inactive for real-time monitoring.

Device List View

To manually add a device, use the "Add Device" button on the toolbar, or right-click any empty space on device view and choose "Add Device" from the context menu. To edit the properties of an already added device, you can select the device and then use the "Device Properties" button on the toolbar, or right-click the device and choose "Device Properties" from the context menu.

Device Toolbar

To add a group, you can use the button "Add Group" on the toolbar, or right-click any empty space on computer list and choose "Add Group" from the context menu. To add a device to a specific group, you can add the device to the device list and drag it into the group or right-click into a group and chose Add Device.

Both options (adding a device or editing its properties) will display a detailed configuration dialog box:

Device Configuration Dialog

You can customize the following device settings in the General Tab:

IP Address: Configured IP address for the specified device.

Device Description: A short description of this device.

Community: SNMP community for OID reads (acts like a SNMP device password).

SNMP Version: SNMP protocol version to be used for data acquisition. Notice that the SNMPv3 authentication leaves the SNMP communication very slow.

        SNMP V3 Auth Username: The username used to access SNMP V3 devices.

        SNMP V3 Auth Password: The password used to access SNMP V3 devices.

        SNMP V3 Auth Algorithm: The algorithm to criptograph the login in SNMP V3 device connection.

Read Timeout: Amount of time (in milliseconds) to wait for a response from the device.

Group OID Reads: Number of SNMP variables to be read in the same SNMP call.

Refresh: Device refresh rate in milliseconds.

Trap Hold Time: Amount of time to hold before resetting a trap item.

General Health: Indicates whether this device is used in system health calculation. Uncheck this box to make system health independent of this device health.

Scan Active: Defines whether the device will be monitored or not.

History Status tags: Enable the history of this device's status tags. Select this to show this device in Health Analyst.

Some device settings are critical. This means that they may be changed only for optimization purposes. Also some devices do not support scanning too many variables in the same SNMP call, so you might have to change the Group OID Reads configuration to use such devices.

For each health tag, two calculation ways are possible: by baseline and threshold adjustment or using the sensibility adjustment.

Health calculation example

You can configure these options by two ways:
 

Condition based: Select the desired value manually. Select Condition Based Bias Adjustment option and then manage baseline and threshold boxes. Baseline indicates the desired value of the tag while threshold is the desired tolerance for it.

Sensibility based: The health calculation is made using the real value of the tag and a multiplier. Select Sensibility Based Adjustment and then, select the desired multiplier using the multiplier bar.

These options are found in Health Calculation tab for three different Performance tags:

Utilization Adjustment: percentual interface utilization. Default baseline value is 5, while threshold default value is 35.

Broadcast Rate Adjustment: amount of broadcast packets through this interface in packets/second. XRatel recommends the values 256 and 512 for baseline and threshold respectively.

Transmission Effectiveness Adjustment: percentual interface transmission integrity. Baseline and threshold defaults values are 95 and 80 percent respectively.

The Reset to Defaults button resets all values to default XRatel values.

Health Calculation Settings

You can define Health status limits in Health Analyst's Limits tab. In this tab, you define the Yellow limit and the Red limit in percents. Yellow limit always is greater than Red limit. By default, the Yellow limit is 40% and the Red limit is 10%. If the tag was over than yellow limit, the status tag would be green, if the tag was between the Yellow limit and the Red limit, the tag would be Yellow, and if the tag was under the Red limit, the status tag would be Red.

Health Analyst Settings Limits

After editing or adding the device, just click on the OK button to close the Device dialog and update the device settings. If you want to discard all changes, just click the Cancel button to close this dialog.