Configuring advanced topology settings

1. Log in to the Concert Operate console.

2. From the main navigation, expand Operate and click Resource management.

3. Click the Settings icon that is next to the search field. Click Topology configuration.

4. On the Advanced setting card, click Configure.

5. From the Advanced topology settings page, set or change any of the settings or values to meet your needs.

   The settings are included within these categories:

   • Topology rendering
   • Topology search
   • Topology tools
   • Resource map

6. After you have completed your changes, click Save to save your changes and return to the Topology configuration page.

Within the Topology rendering section, you can set or change the following settings:

• Default hop type for topology viewer

  Choose the default hop type to be applied when viewing a resource in the Topology Viewer. The default setting is 'element to element'.

• Maximum number of hops allowed

  Select a value in the range 2 - 30 from the drop-down list. The default maximum hop count is `4``.

  Ensure that you set a maximum hop count that does not overload your system data capacity when the maximum hop count is selected.

• Historical changes threshold

  This setting defines the maximum size of a topology based on the number of resources for which the historical changes indicators are enabled in delta mode.

  Set the maximum topology size by entering a value up to, but not exceeding 50.

• Include adjacent relationships on topological hops

  Select whether to retrieve all relationships between resources within a topology by enabling or disabling the toggle. By default, this setting is enabled and all relationships are retrieved.

• Properties required for tooltips or resource and relationship styling

  To improve system performance only specific resource and relationship properties are loaded into the topology viewer. You can specify more properties to be retrieved by adding the properties to the table. These required properties can be uses in topology tooltips, custom status tools or to customize UI elements with JavaScript.

  To add a property, enter the property name within the text field and click Add +.

  After you have added a property, you can choose whether the property can be displayed in a tooltip. If you want to exclude the property from tooltips, clear the Show in tooltip? checkbox.

• Resource types to block from topologies

  Excluded resource types do not display in the Topology Viewer. Excluding resource types can optimize performance when complex topologies are being rendered.

  To exclude a resource type from being displayed in the topology viewer, enter the resource type within the text field and click Add +.

  The seed resource of a topology can not be blocked, and neither can resource groups. You block resource types to improve the performance of graphical seed-based topologies and guard against users adding hops or neighbors that could bring in hundreds of new resources and overwhelm the interface or database. This precaution is unnecessary when viewing a group, as group composition is predefined and neither hop count nor neighbors can be amended.

  Tip: If an administrator unblocks a resource or relationship type while it is being viewed, the browser in which the topology viewer is displayed must be restarted for the unblocked types to appear.

• Relationship types to block from topologies

  Excluded relationship types do not display in the Topology Viewer. Excluding relationship types can optimize performance when complex topologies are being rendered.

  To exclude a relationship type from being displayed in the topology viewer, enter the relationship type within the text field and click Add +.

• Properties to hide in the resource details page

  Excluded properties do not display on the Resource details page. In order to reduce visual clutter, you can hide properties that are of no interest to your operator users.

  If a property has been excluded from view by an administrator, it is removed from the tabular view, but remains visible in JSON format.

  To exclude a property from being displayed on the Resource details page, enter the property within the text field and click Add +.

• Special classification styling

  You can set the incident accent color to change the default border color for resources that are part of an incident, as well as the halo color for the resource with the highest probable cause. You can also select the border pattern for resources that are part of an incident by choosing from a variety of options (such as a solid line, dots or dashes).

  Similarly, you can change the border and halo color for resources as well as the line color for relationships that are single points of failure. Also, you can select the border pattern for resources and the line pattern for relationships, and specify a different icon, for them.

Within the Topology search section, you can define the following settings:

• Add additional properties for filtering

  By default, users can filter the resources, resource groups, or applications displayed on the Resource management page by using the 'entityTypes', 'name' and 'tags' properties. You can add additional properties to be available for filtering.

  Restriction: You cannot define filters by using properties with values that are sets.

  1. Type in a property name, then click Add+.

  2. Select the Operators to be available for the property from the Operators drop-down, then click Add+ again.

  The added properties will be available when operator users define other filter properties on the Resource management page.

• Specify properties to be included in search suggestions and fuzzy searches

  Remember: A fuzzy search retrieves results that are approximations of the search term, rather than exact matches.

  By default, only the 'name' and 'tags' properties are included in search suggestions and fuzzy searches, and you can further focus your search by specifying the following additional properties to be queried: uniqueId, entityTypes, description, and businessCriticality. (The 'tags' property includes other token fields as well.)

  You must select at least one property. If you deselect all properties, the setting reverts to the default 'name and 'tags' properties.

  Restricting the number of properties to be queried can speed up the search in systems with a high number of resources.

• Include deleted resources in Search results

  You can select to include or exclude an option in the topology viewer to include deleted resources within topology viewer search results.

  By default, the display of the option to include deleted resources is enabled. To disable the display of the option to include deleted resources, switch the toggle to Disabled..

Within the Topology tools section, you can add trusted websites that can be accessed through HTTP.

If you need to link to an HTTP address instead of HTTPS while writing a custom tool definition, and need to request data from a site that uses HTTP instead of HTTPS, then you can use the UI server as a proxy. The URL to the HTTP proxy takes the actual target HTTP site URL as a parameter. The proxy then sends the request itself, and returns the response back to the browser.

For security reasons, the HTTP proxy can access only the URLs defined by an administrator user as 'trusted sites'.

The trustedSites property values are a comma-separated list of the trusted sites to which the proxy server can link, and from which it can retrieve information.

Trusted sites operate with a 'starts with' condition.

To add a trusted site, complete the following steps:

1. Within the Trusted website URL table, enter the URL of the trusted site.

   For example, if you include the following URLs, the HTTP proxy permits requests for all target URLs that start with included trusted URL.

   • www.ibm.com
   • data-server.intranet.com:8080/network/statistics

   For instance, you can use the proxy for URLs, such as www.ibm.com/cloud or data-server.intranet.com:8080/network/statistics/1893713/info.

   You cannot use the proxy for URls such as www.ibm.co.uk or data-server.intranet.com:8080

2. Click Add +.

The geospatial mapping feature lets you plot resources on a Resource map at the required zoom level, and also includes the ability to filter resources according to their geospatial areas.

To enable geospatial mapping, you must configure a tile server to provide map image tiles. Tile server providers are available with a range of licenses from free for limited use to paid for. Alternatively, you can deploy an on-site tile server. Any tile provider or mapping data organization you use requires an attribution credit on all maps displayed.

To add a resource map site, complete the following steps:

1. Enter the URL for the map in the Map tile server URL template field.

   Example URL

   https://tile.<example>.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png
   

   Where {z} is the zoom level, and {x} and {y} the tile coordinates.

   Tip: Variations on this basic format are possible. See the TileLayer section on the Leaflet site for more information.

2. Complete one of the following Test substeps:

   • If you are confident that the tile server URL is correct, skip the Test and save the setting. Assuming that the URL is correct, the map will be loaded successfully.

   • If you want to test the connection and you are using MapTiler, Mapbox, or OpenStreetMap as your tile server, validate your map using the Test button (which attempts to fetch a single tile image with the three coordinate placeholders set to zero (0)). If successful, save the setting.

   • If you want to test the connection and you are using a tile server other than MapTiler, Mapbox, or OpenStreetMap, add the tile host to the trusted sources list from the command line (using either oc or kubectl) before testing your map. Use the following *.my-tile-server.com example as a guide:

     oc patch aiopsui aiopsui-instance --type merge -p "{\"spec\":{\"container\":{\"uiServer\":{\"container\":{\"env\":[{\"name\":\"SECURITY__SCRIPTSOURCES\",\"value\":\"api.segment.io cdn.segment.com *.walkme.com *.cloudfront.net *.my-tile-server.com\"}]}}}}}" 
     

     After adding the tile server to the whitelist, validate your map using the Test button (which attempts to fetch a single tile image with the three coordinate placeholders set to zero (0)). If successful, save the setting.

     If your server does not pass the test, the Save button remains unavailable.

3. Set server attribution.

   Server attribution is in the form of HTML and should be provided in your tile provider's documentation.

4. Set the parameters for the cluster threshold and the maximum pixel size.

   CAUTION:
   Accept the default settings unless advised otherwise by an IBM Support representative. Changing your clustering granularity and maximum pixel size affects the performance of your system.

   a. Set Map clustering thresholds (by number of resources).

   When a number of resources are located in close proximity, they are displayed on the Resource map as a cluster. The lower a clustering threshold is set, the coarser your clustering becomes and the more resources will be included when resources are clustered on the Resource map. This may improve system performance.

   • Threshold 1

     • Default is 10000.
     • Up to this number of resources, k-means clustering is used, which automatically determines the best cluster split of resources based on the distance between resources.

   • Threshold 2

     • Default is 30000.
     • Up to this number of resources, convex grid clustering is used, which splits the area where resources are into an X by X grid based on the map clustering pixel size, and then displays those resources within an appropriately shaped polygon.

   • Threshold 3

     • Default is 50000.
     • Up to this number of resources, the grid clustering is displayed as a standard shape determined by the cluster boundaries (rather than a bespoke polygon).

   • Threshold 4

     • Default is 100000.
     • As for the previous threshold, except a larger grid size is used.
     • Above this number, grid clustering with a very large grid size is used.

   b. Set Map clustering pixel size.

   The default is 150. Increasing the maximum pixel size for clustering resources may improve performance at the cost of cluster resolution.

Once a map has been defined, it can be accessed from the Resource management and More details pages, as described here.