The System Insight Profile allows you to create, edit or remove profiles and filters that you want to use to display or store statistics using the system insight service.

Note!

The System Insight service must be running before you create a profile. You start the service using the command mzsh service start. For information on how to configure System Insight services, see 2.2.1 Configure System Insight Services.

The filter you create is determined by the metric that you want to send to the system insight service, and can be further refined by determining the tag name and tag value that you want to store and/or visualize.

For further information on System Insight, see System Insight.

Configuration

To create a new System Insight profile configuration, click the New Configuration button in the upper left part of the Desktop window, and then select System Insight Profile from the menu.

The contents of the menus in the menu bar may change depending on which configuration type has been opened in the currently displayed tab. The System Insight profile uses the standard menu items and buttons that are visible for all configurations, and these are described in 2.1 Menus and Buttons.

The System Insight profile consists of two tabs: Filters and Detected Metrics.

Filters Tab

The Filters tab is displayed by default.

System Insight profile - Filters tab

Setting Description

Profile Description Name the profile.

Retention Policy

Select the retention policy that you want to apply to the profile from the drop-down list. If you have installed System Insight with InfluxDB and Grafana, using the scripts provided, as described in 2.1 Installing System Insight using Scripts, the retention policies of one week, six months or one year are available for selection, and the default is one_week.

If you select the retention policy (Database Default), the default retention policy of the database that you are using for System Insight applies.

If the property storage-backend is set to anything other than influxdb in the system-insight block of of the custom.conf for services, retention policies are unavailable for selection.

System Insight Filter Enabled Select this check box to set the profile to enabled status so that you can use the filters in the profile. If a profile is not set to enabled, you cannot use the filters it contains to produce the required statistics.

To Create a Filter

To create a Filter in the Filters tab, take the following steps:

Click the Add button.
In the Add Filter Settings dialog that is displayed, enter a metric name in regular expression in the Metric RegEx dialog box.
Click the Add button, and if required, enter a Tag Name, and a tag value in regular expression in the Tag RegEx field.

The fields in the Add Filter Settings are free text, but there are specific naming conventions for the metrics that you add. For guidance on how to determine a filter, see the section below, Determining a Filter.

Determining a Filter

You have two sources that can aid you to determine filters:

You can use the command mzsh systeminsight metrics, which provides a list of all the possible metrics, tags and tag values for your setup since you started the system insight service. For further information, see 2.2.34 systeminsight in the Command Line Tool User's guide.

Alternatively, you can go to the Detected Metrics tab, which also provides the same list of all the possible metrics, tags and tag values for your setup since you started the system insight service. For further information, see the section, Detected Metrics tab below.

If you want everything detected for a specific metric to be sent to the system insight service, you do not require to add any tag name or tag value. See the example below.

Example - A filter for everything detected for a specific metric

If you want everything detected for host.storage.iostats to be sent to the system insight service:

You use regular expression for the metric name: host\.storage\.iostats and leave the Tags empty.

You can use the Detected Metrics tab to help you determine the filter:

Detected Metrics Tab

In the Detected Metrics tab, the possible metrics, tags and tag values detected for your setup since you started the system insight service are displayed to help you create a filter that you can then add to the filters in the Filters tab. This tab is not populated with data until you have started the system insight service.

System Insight profile - Metrics tab

The Metric names pane shows the names of the metrics currently detected, based on your setup. For more detailed information on metrics, and their default tags, see 4.1 Displaying Metrics using System Insight.

The selection that you make in the Metric names pane in the tree structure check boxes, determines the tags that you can set. The tags that you can set are displayed in the Tag Name column and you can select the corresponding tag value(s) available in the Tag Value column. The more selections you make, it is normally the case that the fewer tags are available, as it is the tags that the selected metrics have in common that you can then filter on.

To Determine a Metric for a Filter

To display the possible tags and tag values you can apply to create a filter, take the following steps:

In the Metric name tree structure, select the metric that you want to visualize, e g host.storage.iostats, which means you select host, then storage, then iostats in the tree structure.

The pane on the right displays the tags and tag values that you can use to create a filter, e g the figure above shows the possible tags and tag values available for host.storage.iostats.
For the tag that you want to select, click the corresponding field in the Tag Value column to display the list of possible tag values. To select each tag value that you want to use, select the relevant check box(es).
Click the Create Filter button. You skip to the Filters tab where the filter you just created is added to the list of filters for the profile.
When your filter is added to the Filters tab, quote characters \Q and \E are used in the tag value regular expression to escape special characters.

If you start another workflow, you can update the possible metrics shown in the Metric name tree structure to show the mim metrics for the workflow, by clicking the Refresh button. Possible mim metrics are displayed for workflows that are running or have been run since the system insight service was started.

Note!

The tag names and tag values that are displayed are determined by the difference between each selection of one of the tree structure items.

Compare the two images below:

In this instance, you select to create a metric that includes all host data by selecting host in the tree structure:

This creates the following metric with no tags: host\..*

If you select to create a metric that includes all of the data for host.compute, host.network and host.storage, you can see from the figure below that by defining the metric further, by selecting each subcategory for host, the filter is narrowed as these three metrics have less tags in common:

This creates the following metric with no tags: host\.compute|host\.network|host\.storage.*

Example - Determining a filter

In this example, you want to monitor all of the MIMS that are processed by workflows that run on a specific ECSA. You want statistics on all of the Analysis and workflow data. You keep all of these workflow in the same folder, named SI in this instance.

This means that data is sent to the system insight service for all of the MIMs processed by Analysis agents, and real-time workflows that are running on the ECSA1 pico instance, where the workflows are in the SI folder.

You can use the Detected Metrics tab to help you determine the filter:

Next:

9.79.3 System Insight Collection Agent

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