ASM Portal

The following video serves as an excellent reference for users who are new to the ASM portal.

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ASM Portal Navigation

Below is an overview of the ASM platform navigation. It allows users to easily find all of the features offered within ASM. This article provides an overview of the different pages which can be accessed from the top navigation bar.

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Clicking on the ASM image to the left of the Overview menu item will always bring you back to the main Dashboard.

Overview

Dashboard

See Dashboards for more information.

Apica Panels

The “Apica Panels” menu item allows users to view their configured Apica Panels instances. Apica Panels is a feature which allows users to integrate Apica data into Grafana dashboards for easier viewing; see Using the Apica Panels Dashboards for a complete overview of the feature. The “Apica Panels” menu item contains two sub-items: “Panels” and “About”.

Panels

Clicking the “Panels” link will bring you to the Panels page, on which you can see a high level overview of your Panels dashboards and open or delete an individual Panels dashboard.

The default Panels version available in the ASM SaaS portal is called “Apica Panels (v2)”. There are two major versions of Apica Panels; one version is based on Grafana version 4, and the other (Panels v2) is based on Grafana version 8. Apica Panels (v1) is only available to customers who had ASM Panels enabled before the major version change and have a need to maintain their older dashboards.

About (Apica Panels)

Clicking on the “About” sub-menu item will bring you to the “About” page, which provides a high-level overview of the Apica Panels feature.

Tools

The Tools section provides access to a number of different system features, such as Impersonate, API settings, Maintenance, Journal, Trace Route, and Messages.

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Impersonate

With the Impersonate tool you can view Synthetic Monitoring from a different user's perspective. This feature can be very useful for troubleshooting or assisting your users with any problem they may encounter.

Start Impersonation

The Impersonate tool allows Admin users to use Synthetic Monitoring with the permissions and settings of another user.

Impersonate User

To impersonate a user:

• Open the Tools menu

• Click Impersonate

• Use the Filter to search for users

• Find the user in the table

• Click Impersonate

Drop Impersonation

When you want to stop impersonating, you can drop the impersonation without logging out and in again.

Drop Impersonation

To stop impersonating a user:

• Open the User menu

• Click Drop Impersonation

The user context is switched back to the original one.

Maintenance

The Maintenance view lets you modify or delete result records for individual checks and recalculate any associated consolidation records. The table shows a list of previous maintenance tasks and information about them:

Maintenance Tasks

Maintenance tasks can be created by selecting relevant checks and applying the appropriate action.

Apply Action

The apply action section lets you select what action to apply to the selected checks and queue the task for processing.

Press Process Selected Records to remove the results.

Selector View

The selectors allow you to pick which checks to include in the task.

Create A Maintenance Task

Maintenance tasks can be created by selecting relevant checks and applying the appropriate action.

To create a maintenance task:

1. Select the check results you want to modify:

2. Type from the list

3. Check from the list

4. Pick a period:

5. Enter a From date and time

6. Enter a To date and time

7. Search for strings in message texts, if needed

8. Click Refresh

9. Click Process Selected Records

A database task is placed in a queue for execution. It will run as soon as possible.

When queued, the maintenance task is visible in the Task table.

Table

The table shows the result of applying the selectors.

Journal

The Journal keeps a record of all user actions taken in the system.

Selectors

The journal can be filtered by a number of parameters.

Entries

The Entries table shows the result of applying the selectors.

Traceroute

The Traceroute tool allows you to easily run a Traceroute from any of our Apica Locations to any URL or IP address you choose.

Introduction

The purpose of running a traceroute is to get an indication of which way traffic takes between a source and a destination. Traceroute sends test Packet with TTL values starting at 1. The resulting ICMP Time Exceeded messages are used to discover any devices (called "hops") forwarding the packets to the destination. For each hop, the response time is recorded to indicate transmission speed. Any detected failures or packet losses on the way are also the recorder and displayed to give an idea of the transmission quality.

Configuration

The Traceroute tool configuration is fairly simple.

These Tracroute settings are used by default and are not configurable:

Traceroute Results

The results of the traceroute run is shown in the results frame.

The first line shows information about the traceroute configuration:

Hostname and IP address, the upper limit on hops to try, and size of the test packets.

On each subsequent row, information about each hop is shown:

Hop Number, hostname and/or IP address for the hop, and ther response times for each of the three test packets.

Messages

The Messages view lets you configure system messages to display to Synthetic Monitoring users.

View

Configuration

Formatting

The message can contain some formatting. You format the text by putting the text within .

Create Message

Messages can be added from the Messages view.

Add New Message

• Click the Add New Message button

The Add New Messages dialog is shown

Configuration

Formatting

The message can contain some formatting. You format the text by putting the text within .

Filter Checks

All checks in all monitor groups can be filtered by using the filter buttons.

Filter Checks By Status

To filter out all checks with a particular status:

• Click the color button in the menu bar for each status type you want to view

The button is highlighted, and only checks matching the status are shown in the dashboard.

• Click the same color(s) again to disable the filter

Log In

Synthetic Monitoring is accessed through a web-based control panel, using basic authentication.

How to log in

To log in to Synthetic Monitoring:

• Obtain your user and password from your system administrator

• Open the Apica Synthetic Portal in your browser:

The login dialog is displayed:

• Enter your username and password

• Click Log In

When you have been logged in, the Overview Dashboard will be displayed.

The first time you log in (before creating checks), this view may be mostly empty.

Remember Me

You can have the browser remember your credentials, so you won't have to type them each time you log in. 

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To cache your username and password in the browser:

• Click the Remember Me checkbox

Reset Password

In case you forget your password, you can reset it from the login dialog.

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To reset the password:

• Click the Forgot Your Password link

A dialog opens:

• Enter your User Name

• Click Continue

An email is sent to the address registered for your account.

Apica Password and Login Policy

Apica Synthetic Monitoring Portal logins will enforce the following minimum password requirements, in line with Apica security policy password and account security.

The features below are Opt-In and need to be activated in coordination with Apica Support.

For more information, contact support@apica.io.

New Integration +

New integration checks are created from the New Integration + menu.

Menu

• Click New Integration +

• Select a Check type to create by clicking on the icon.

The New Integration wizard is shown.

New Integration Configuration

Configuration

After the New Integration wizard has been completed, the finished check is opened in edit mode.

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In the edit view, you can set further configuration options for the check.

The exact options available vary with integration type.

New Integration Creation Wizard

All integration check types can be created through the New Integration wizard. The details vary with integration type, but the general principles are the same for all of them.

Create Wizard: Step 1 Information

In the first step, you can name the check and add a description.

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Create Wizard: Step 2 Specifics

In the second step, you provide

• integration information,

• metric settings,

• Locations - Introduction, and

• other integration-specific settings.

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Create Wizard: Step 3 Options

Step 3: Options

In the third step you can configure

• how often the check is to run,

• set threshold values for check notifications, and

• add it to one or more Monitor Groups.

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Step 4: Confirmation

The final step shows all configurations made, and allows you to go back to revise the check or move forward and create it.

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Status Filter

To the right of the navigation bar, there is a color coded status summary of all the checks associated with your user account.

Menu

The numbers in the colored boxes indicate the number of checks with that status.

Colors

Check Status is represented by four colors:

The colors are used in any context where the check status is displayed.

Filter Checks

All checks in all monitor groups can be filtered by using the filter buttons.

Filter Checks By Status

To filter out all checks with a particular status:

• Click the color button in the menu bar for each status type you want to view

The button is highlighted, and only checks matching the status are shown in the dashboard.

• Click the same color(s) again to disable the filter