Defining advanced topology settings

As a system administrator, you can define advanced topology settings, such as the URLs for trusted sites and a geolocation map, the required properties for tooltips or relationship type styles, additional properties to be available when defining search filters, or the maximum hop numbers a user can choose in the topology viewer. You do this from the Advanced topology settings page accessed through DASH.

1. As a user with the inasm_admin role, log into your DASH web application.
2. Select Administration > Topology configuration.
   The Topology configuration page is displayed.
3. Click Configure on the Advanced settings card.
   The Advanced topology settings page is displayed consisting of the expandable Topology rendering, Topology search, and Topology tools sections.

Topology rendering

4. Define the following advanced settings that determine how topologies are rendered.

   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

   Choose a number between zero and thirty.

   The default maximum hop count is four.

   CAUTION:

   Ensure that you set a maximum hop count that, if selected by an operator, will not overload your system's data capacity.

   Historical change threshold

   The maximum size of a topology as defined by its constituent resources for which the historical changes indicators will be enabled when in Delta mode.

   The default is 50.

   Include adjacent relationships

   To retrieve all relationships between resources in a topology, set this toggle to Enabled.

   Disabling this setting reduces processing on highly connected topologies.

   The default setting is 'disabled'.

   Properties required

   To improve system performance and usability, specific elements can be either hidden or included for display in the Topology Viewer.

   To add a required property (or resource or relationship), enter its name (for example location), then click Add +. To delete it, click the bin icon next to it.

   Properties required for tooltips or styling

   You can specify additional properties for tooltips or resource and relationship styling here. These properties may then be used in tooltips, custom status tools or to customize UI elements.

   To exclude a required property from being displayed in a tooltip, clear the Show in tooltip? check box next to the required property.

   Resource or relationship types to block

   In order to optimize performance when rendering complex topologies, you can exclude specific resource or relationship types.

   Note: The seed resource of a topology can not be blocked, and neither can resource groups.

   To block a resource or relationship type from being displayed in the Topology Viewer, enter the type into the Blocked resource type or Blocked relationship type field, then click Add +.

   Excluded resource or relationship types are not displayed in the Topology Viewer, though operators can see a list of excluded types on the Filtering toolbar.

   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.

   Properties to hide

   In order to reduce visual clutter, you can hide properties that are of no interest to your operator users from being displayed on the Resource details page.

   Enter the property to be hidden, then click Add+.

Topology search

5. By default, users can filter the resources, resource groups or applications displayed on the Resource management page using the 'entityTypes', 'name' and 'tags' properties (on-prem only).

   Add additional properties for filtering

   Limitation: You cannot define filters 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 (on-prem only).

6. By default, deleted resources are not returned in the topology search, and users do not have the option to include them.

   Include deleted resources in search results

   You can toggle between Disabled and Enabled to give users the option to include deleted resources when performing a search.

Topology tools

7. By default, the system only returns data from a site that uses secure HTTPS.

   Trusted websites that can be accessed via 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, you can use the Agile Service Manager 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 only access the URLs that have been defined by an administrator user as 'trusted sites'.

   To add a trusted website, enter the URL into the URL of trusted website field and click Add +.

   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 under a 'starts with' condition. For example, you could add the following trusted sites:

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

   In this example, the HTTP proxy will allow requests for all target URLs that start with 'www.ibm.com' or with 'data-server.intranet.com:8080/network/statistics', but no others, as illustrated in the following examples.

   Allowed http proxy targets

   www.ibm.com/cloud

   data-server.intranet.com:8080/network/statistics/1893713/info

   Not allowed http proxy targets

   data-server.intranet.com:8080

   www.ibm.co.uk

   www.news-page.com

Resource map

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.

8. To add a resource map, complete the following steps.
   Important: 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.

   Tip: For more information and examples of configuring, using or creating a tile server, see the Switch to OpenStreetMap website.
   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. Validate your map using the Test button (which attempts to fetch a single tile image with the three coordinate placeholders set to zero (0)).
      Note: 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.
9. Set the parameters for the cluster threshold and the maximum pixel size.
   CAUTION:

   Accept the default settings unless advised otherwise by a Support representative. Changing your clustering granularity and maximum pixel size affects the performance of your system.
   1. 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.

   2. 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.
10. Click Save.