Getting Started

What does ServicePilot do?

ServicePilot is a high-performance analytics platform that supports observability and full-stack monitoring: metrics, traces and logs. You can collect data from many services and sources across your entire IT stack (ITIM, NPM, APM, DEM, SIEM) as well as view details of historical data stored by ServicePilot.

After you have installed a ServicePilot agent and configured technology packages to send data to ServicePilot, you can analyze it with the built-in and custom monitoring dashboards, alert on event and threshold conditions, and perform automated analytics with PDF reporting.

To provide these services, you will need access to the ServicePilot SaaS platform and some basic set-up. The pre-requisites consist of:

1. A valid ServicePilot account - to log in to the ServicePilot web pages
2. A ServicePilot Agent - to collect data

ITIM - IT Infrastructure Monitoring

IT infrastructure monitoring with ServicePilot allows you to automatically monitor all your servers and IT resources. The collection of key performance indicators on all the IT layers of the datacenter (storage bays, physical servers, UPS, IoT, etc.) allows you to carry out a complete monitoring of critical resources and to correlate the elements of the IT infrastructure according to your needs (geographical, business, technological, etc.).

NPM - Network Performance Monitoring

Network Performance Monitoring with ServicePilot provides full visibility into the availability and performance of your LAN, WAN or SDWAN. The technology packages allow automatic discovery and monitoring for many devices on the market (Cisco, HP, Versa Networks, Citrix...). You can also analyze the Netflow traffic on your routers live or with historical dashboards.

APM - Application Performance Monitoring

Application Performance Monitoring with ServicePilot provides intelligent observability of your applications by bringing together the 3 types of APM data: metrics, logs and traces. With the ServicePilot agent and very little configuration, you can automatically monitor key metrics for all your applications, such as request volume, web transaction response times and view key application server traffic metrics including latency, TCP retransmissions and more.

DEM - Digital Experience Monitoring

Digital Experience Monitoring with ServicePilot allows you to combine web-based synthetic testing with Real User Monitoring (RUM) to analyze user activity in web applications. You can view load times, client/server errors and technology dependencies of your application (database or web server) to quickly resolve issues by correlating application and infrastructure performance in a single dashboard.

SIEM - Security Information and Event Management

Log management and security event monitoring with ServicePilot allows you to send and process all logs produced by your applications and infrastructure. You can observe your logs in real time in the event tray, create alerting rules or use the dashboards to analyze your logs over time.

Set up a ServicePilot account

Before being able to access ServicePilot web pages, a customer account will be required. Go to the ServicePilot SaaS Login page and use the Sign up link to create an account.

Once you have your login Username and Password you can use these to open your ServicePilot web pages.

To manage your account and create other users and groups, see the Users documentation.

Install a ServicePilot Agent

Before ServicePilot can do anything, it needs to receive monitoring data. There are a number of different ServicePilot Agents. Choose the ServicePilot agent you require, download and install the agent from the ServicePilot web pages.

Download a ServicePilot Agent

1. Using a user with administrative privileges, log in to ServicePilot.
2. Open SETTINGS > Menu
3. Click on Agents > Install
4. Select the Agent to install and follow the instructions under Get started

ServicePilot Agents are explained in more detail in the Agents documentation.

Start monitoring equipment

A ServicePilot Agent may be able to collect data but ServicePilot still needs to be told what each Agent should do. There are two main ways in which equipment may be added to the configuration:

• Adding resource configuration manually
• Rules to provision resources automatically when equipment is discovered

The provisioning required will depend on the type of resource monitored. See package documentation for details when adding a resource manually.

ServicePilot provisioning is explained in more detail in the Provisioning documentation.

Add a manual resource

To monitor a device, pick one of the pre-configured packages and add it to the configuration by answering a few questions. These normally include the device IP address, which ServicePilot Agent to use to query this device and what sort of supervision is required.

1. Using a user with administrative privileges, log in to ServicePilot.
2. Open SETTINGS > Menu
3. Click on Provisioning > Views
4. Select the type of monitoring package needed by category and use the filter to limit the options displayed
5. Drag a package into the central view editor and let go
6. Set the resource properties based on the package type selected. A unique resource name is always required as well as all fields highlighted with a *.
7. To view package documentation, click on Doc next to the package name
8. Click OK
9. Finally, click Save all changes

Note: many packages use SNMP queries to obtain information. You may need to specify an SNMP policy with the correct credentials to monitor the device. See the Policies documentation for details.

See Add a manual resource for more details.

Add an Auto-provisioning rule

It is also possible to automatically monitor resources when new agents are deployed. Set up auto-provisioning rules to tell ServicePilot what package to use when adding a new agent and where to place the resource in the monitoring hierarchy.

1. Using a user with administrative privileges, log in to ServicePilot.
2. Open SETTINGS > Menu
3. Click on Provisioning > Auto-provisioning
4. Click on Add a rule
5. Complete the Automatic provisioning rule dialog. Specify at least a Rule name and set the Discovery type based on the Agent installed.
6. Click OK
7. Finally, click Save

See Auto-provisioning for more details.

View data collected

Once equipment or resources are monitored, data is collected and can be viewed in different ways from the left-hand menu.

Monitoring

Real-time data and the current resource status can be viewed in different ways.

Menu item	Data views
View	The View sub-menu shows data as a hierarchy of views that contain further views and objects and graphical elements. The objects contain indicators which store the data obtained.
Fullstack	The Fullstack sub-menu shows relationships between hardware, networks and web applications when collecting data from different sources.
Map	The Map sub-menu shows views that have been configured with geo-coordinates.
Status	The Status sub-menu provides lists of resources, objects, views and classes by status.

Sub-Menu

Menu item	Data views
Host	The Host sub-menu shows all monitored resources by IP address or domain name.
Treemap	The Treemap sub-menu shows an area map hierarchy of views
Tree	The Tree sub-menu shows a tree of views.
Matrix	The Matrix sub-menu shows tables of hosts or resources set against views or the collection types the resources perform.
Uptime	The Uptime sub-menu shows Availability & Performance of views and objects as a grid over time.
List	The List sub-menu shows a table of Availability & Performance statistics and alarm counts for all views.

Analysis

For event data received by ServicePilot that is not associated with objects and the composition of data from multiple sources into dashboards, see the menu items under Analysis. ServicePilot provides multiple dashboards that are composed of widgets, each of which querying the ServicePilot database and presenting data in a particular form.

Dashboards may be added to a list of favorites for quicker access.

Custom dashboards can be created built from existing widgets or from completely new queries into the ServicePilot database.

See the Dashboards documentation for more details.

Menu item	Data views
Portal	View favorite dashboards, custom dashboards, global dashboards and manage the favorite dashboard list.
Metrics & KPI	View the per package summary dashboards and the per resource detail dashboards.
Events & Logs	View the ServicePilot events, alerts as well as received Syslogs and SNMP Traps.
APM	View Application and Network Performance Monitoring statistic dashboards.

Tools

The Tools menu groups together items that are used on occasion, either to define a new database search or diagnose in detail why a device is unreachable or view historical PDF reports.

See the Search documentation for details on custom searches.

Menu item	Tool views
Search	Perform custom ServicePilot database searches.
Diagnostics	Check connectivity between ServicePilot Agents and devices as well ServicePilot Agent host inventory.
Machine Learning	Analyze Machine Learning Spike, Cluster and Trend anomalies associated with the statistics collected.
PDF reports	The PDF reports view allows for the generation of PDF reports based on templates built-in or generated by ServicePilot administrators. Scheduled reports might also be retrieved.

Settings

As an administrative user of ServicePilot, configuration may be changed under the Settings menu items. Start with Users, Agents, Provisioning and Policies documentation for more details.

Menu item	Settings views
Menu	Landing page for ServicePilot Administration.
Agents	Shortcut access to the status and management of ServicePilot Agents.
Add Resource	Quickly add a new resource to monitor.

Concepts

What is a Package?

A deployment entity which contains definitions (classes, view, objects, dashboard, PDF reports)

A package is a collection of pre-configured elements that can be imported into a ServicePilot configuration. A number of parameters are applied to the package when importing it into the configuration to monitor equipment as desired. These parameters are package dependent but a graphical wizard presents the information requested.

ServicePilot provides a host of build-in packages to monitor different equipment types. If a package does not exist for a particular device, it is often possible to monitor this device using a collection of built-in packages to monitor different parts of the device's operation.

Example: A server-microsoft-windows-snmp package defines components of a Windows Server to monitor (Disk, CPU, Memory, Ethernet, etc) and how to discover and monitor each of these using SNMP.

What is a resource?

Use of package

A resource is one use of a package in the running configuration. The package definition plus the unique parameters applied in the package wizard result in a unique resource that helps build up the elements monitored by ServicePilot.

Example: A server-microsoft-windows-snmp package is added to the ServicePilot configuration and becomes a resource to be monitored by the provisioning of this package with specific package parameters such as SNMP access credentials.

What are Views?

Hierarchical containers to organize resources by location or business function

Objects containing statistics are added to ServicePilot by placing them in a logical hierarchy of elements called views. Each uniquely named view may contain other views or objects as well as other graphical elements. The nested views allow different hierarchies to be built up by ServicePilot administrators, possibly to present equipment by geographic location or service grouping.

The worst status of the monitored equipment percolates up from the indicators to their container objects and then on to the view in which the object is placed, all the way up the hierarchy to the root MAIN view.

Example: An Office A view might be created as a container in which to place all servers, network switches and applications that are based at this particular location.

What are Objects?

A collection of statistics

Objects are uniquely named collections of indicators, each indicator being a captured or calculated statistic. Each object will collect data from a single source. Based on the availability of source data, object availability over time is calculated. If any indicators exceed defined thresholds then the object will also take on the state of the worst performing indicator. Objects may therefore be in the following states:

State	Description
- OK	Object source data is available and all of the object's indicators are nominal or unknown
- Minor	At least one of the object's indicators has passed a minor threshold but none of the indicators are currently major or critical
- Major	At least one of the object's indicators has passed a major threshold but none of the indicators are currently critical
- Critical	At least one of the object's indicators has passed a critical threshold
- Unavailable	The object source data is unreachable
- Unknown	The object's state has not been determined either because it has yet to collect data or it has specifically been told to ignore data by placing the object in an unmanaged state

Example: An object named Server - eth0 collects data from a single Ethernet interface.

What is an Indicator?

A single statistic

Each indicator in an object presents a single statistic over time. Each indicator might have up to 3 thresholds that will change the state of the indicator, and the object container, depending on the indicator's value.

Indicators are either collected from monitored equipment or calculated:

Indicator type	Source
Monitor	The indicator data is obtained by querying the monitored device
Complex	The indicator data is calculated based on the values of the monitored indicator data received

Example: An object named Server - eth0 includes indicators 'Status' and 'In Traffic'. Indicators like the 'In Load' percentage are then calculated.

Further information

The ServicePilot web interface contains texts and descriptions to help use the tool.

To view explainations, go to the built-in help pages:

1. Open the Help pop-up
2. Select one of the tabs

Built-in help

In many places a question mark icon provides further information, either as a tooltip or as more detailed web pages.