Custom Navigator view characteristics

Custom Navigator views and the Navigator Physical view have characteristics that distinguish them from one another. Understanding these distinctions and the customization options can help you design the most effective Navigator views.

Navigator Physical view
The Navigator Physical view is the default Navigator view. It shows your monitored enterprise as a physical mapping of managed systems by their node names and operating systems. The Navigator Physical view is a discovered view: as managed systems are added to the monitored environment, the Cloud Pak System Software Monitoring Portal Server discovers them and displays them in the Navigator view.
As well as showing the physical hierarchy of your environment, the Navigator gives you visual indication of situation events that occur on managed systems associated with a Navigator item and organizes your workspaces.
You can create situations and associate them with the Navigator items where you want to see alert indicators and you can create workspaces and report data from the managed systems assigned to that branch of the tree. But you cannot edit the Navigator Physical view itself.
Custom Navigator views
You can create Navigator views for logical hierarchies, such as by location or business application. With custom Navigator views, you can create Navigator items and determine their managed system assignments. You can add Navigator items either by dragging and dropping them from a source Navigator view to the target view or by creating them manually.
The drag and drop method shares the item in the source and target Navigator views. When you share an item, all managed system assignments, workspaces, and situations associated with the source item are applied. Future changes to one item are applied to the other. A shared icon is displayed over the source and target Navigator item icons. It provides a visual reminder of the relationship so that you do not unintentionally change or delete an item from one Navigator view that might affect another view. You cannot change the managed system assignments of Navigator items that were shared using the drag and drop method.
For Navigator items added with Create child item, you control the management system assignments:
  • Navigator items with no managed systems assigned cannot have situations associated with them, thus no alert indicators are displayed on the item except as part of the roll-up display of events. This might be what you want for a container (parent) Navigator item.
  • Navigator items can have managed system assigned statically. When creating the item, you assign managed systems or managed system groups (or both) through the Monitored Resources tab of the Navigator item properties. Initially, static items are not shared with other items nor are situations associated with them.
  • Navigator items can have managed systems assigned dynamically. When creating the item, you assign a managed system group (or groups) through the Dynamic Items tab. The Navigator item is then populated by all the managed systems that belong to that group. For example, you might have a Navigator item named Far West with Arizona and California managed system groups assigned as dynamic items. Any managed systems added or removed from those groups are reflected in the Far West branch. The items at the agent and attribute level are shared from the Navigator Physical view.
    Support
       Collapse Far West
          Expand Arizona
          Collapse California
               Expand JOSE95101
               Expand LEANDRO94579
               Collapse MARINO91108
                   Collapse UNIX OS
                       Collapse Disk Usage
                       Collapse File Information
                       Collapse Network
                       Collapse ...
    Options for dynamic members enable you to hide any or all of these items: group level, node level, or attribute level. For example, the Support branch looks like this when all options are disabled:
    Support
       Collapse Far West
          Collapse UNIX OS
  • You can assign managed systems and managed system groups to a new Navigator item, including the assignment of managed system groups as dynamic members.