Getting started with IT Essentials Work

How can I see what's happening in my entire infrastructure?

The Infrastructure Overview helps you to keep tabs on entity health. Out-of-the-box dashboards provide a quick view of the status of key KPIs for different entity types. You can understand what’s going on at an entity level, as well as across your entire infrastructure with Infrastructure Overview. Visualizations let you see which specific entities have high CPU usage and drill down into that specific entity to see what’s causing it. The ability to group by entity type, apply filters and see logs associated with specific metric data enables log-based analysis for speedy and seamless troubleshooting.

From a single view, you can see all your data — whether metric or log event data — and correlate key dimensions for context and performance. You can define groups to easily group and filter infrastructure metrics, status, alerts and investigations. This holistic view allows for a better understanding of infrastructure health so you can observe and understand the performance of your entities. Having one workspace with high-level visualizations makes it easier to determine trends, conduct immediate investigations and reduce context switching.

How can I troubleshoot problems more quickly?

IT Essentials Work lets you use out-of-the-box dashboards to get up and running immediately and see the status of key KPIs over time. You can quickly identify trends or specific points in time where KPI status changed, and drill down into the entity health page where you can monitor metrics like average CPU usage, average memory usage, average datastore latency and average network traffic across all hosts. With IT Essential Work, you can see what’s happening, troubleshoot faults and get a specific, entity-level view of the issue — without writing queries or code or building custom dashboards.

IT Essentials Work includes a feature called Event Data Search, that lets you quickly analyze the health of your infrastructure. Event Data Search looks at entity status across different infrastructure types and identifies inactive entities that could be causing issues in the production environment. With this capability, you can track the status of entities based on variation in data ingestion rate, drill down into individual entities to analyze log data to track performance entities and speed up troubleshooting using the infrastructure data from application logs.

How can I use more sophisticated alerting techniques to triage faster?

Custom-triggered alerting at a group or entity level lets you perform root cause analysis faster. You can also triage alerts more effectively by understanding which conditions triggered the alert, assessing the severity of the alert and viewing all triggered alerts to decide what actions to take. By setting up thresholds and generating alerts at a specific infrastructure level and being able to analyze alerts across different infrastructure types, you can get alerted on your most vital metrics.