Chapter 5: Customizing Your Business
Views
This section contains the following topics:
Why You Need Unicenter Management Portal (see page 189)
CleverPath Portal Technology (see page 190)
Users, Workgroups, and Security Profiles (see page 191)
Scoreboards and Dashboards (see page 191)
Unicenter MP Administration (see page 193)
Workplace Templates (see page 196)
Working with Components (see page 198)
Why You Need Unicenter Management Portal
Unicenter Management Portal (Unicenter MP) delivers a consolidated view of enterprise management information provided by CA NSM components and other CA products using the familiar web portal model.
Unicenter MP complements CA NSM advanced visualization by doing the following:
■ Delivering a process-oriented view of enterprise management information, focusing on intelligent delivery
■ Personalizing and tailoring information to the needs of each user ■ Providing an additional layer of access security to the management
infrastructure
Unicenter MP helps to expose enterprise management information by means of the Web to a very broad audience, including network and systems
administrators, performance groups, customers, business partners, and inside users. The portal's lightweight HTML-based interfaces provide fast and secure access to the information within and outside of the enterprise.
A new generation of Internet-based technologies introduces new challenges and opportunities. In Unicenter MP, you can tailor enterprise information to address the business needs of specific users. For example, Unicenter MP lets you provide access for the following users to information that is relevant to their business needs:
■ Business customers, who routinely use the Web for other purposes, expect service providers to use the same technology to inform them of service level agreements, critical problems, status of specific resources, and simple tests they can use to verify service availability.
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■ Business partners need to be able to exchange enterprise management information between enterprises.
■ Traditional CA NSM users (for example, enterprise management groups or network administrators) need to share information with other groups within the enterprise (for example, performance groups, application groups, IT managers, Business Executives, users, and so on).
Unicenter MP provides a clear, real-time view of information that makes it easy to understand how IT affects a particular business unit or application. It
eliminates users from viewing lengthy status reports that do not apply directly to them in order to find information.
CleverPath Portal Technology
Unicenter MP employs CleverPath Portal (CPP) technologies to deliver Unicenter content in a role-based portal environment. Unicenter MP installs an embedded version of CleverPath Portal 4.72 with the Light Search Engine only.
A Unicenter MP installation enforces the following restrictions on CleverPath Portal deployment and configuration:
■ Unicenter MP does not support non-framed CleverPath templates.
■ Unicenter MP supports only a subset of the databases that CleverPath Portal supports.
■ Unicenter MP supports only a subset of the application servers that CleverPath Portal supports.
■ Unicenter MP requires CPP to run with a private version of JRE 1.5.0.
Note: The same restrictions should be honored if Unicenter MP is installed on top
of CleverPath Portal.
For additional information about CleverPath Portal, see the CleverPath Portal
Administrator Help and User Help. Access these help systems within Unicenter
MP by clicking the Help button on the top right of the interface (User Help) or clicking the link for either help system under the Help sub-tree on the Portal Administration page.
Chapter 5: Customizing Your Business Views 191
Users, Workgroups, and Security Profiles
Unicenter MP implements role-based management of your enterprise
information by controlling access to Unicenter portlets and the actions available in portlets based on the Unicenter MP workgroups to which a user belongs. Unicenter MP lets you add users and organize them into workgroups. The workgroup a user belongs to controls access to portlets, channels, and library folders based on the view and modify permissions associated with these objects in the workgroup. Administrators can grant permissions to an individual user or to workgroups. For more information about users and workgroups, see the
Implementation Guide and the CleverPath Portal Administrator Help, which you
can access from the Help sub-tree of the Portal Administration page.
To control access to the actions available in a portlet, Unicenter MP uses the concept of security profiles. Each workgroup has a security profile associated with it. The same security profile can be mapped to multiple groups. Each security profile consists of a set of permissions that control individual actions in the Unicenter portlets. You, as administrator, can modify the existing profiles, or create a new one, using the Unicenter MP Administration Wizard.
You can access the wizard from the Unicenter MP Administration workplace that is available to the admin user. Also, as a member of the Admin workgroup, you can access the wizard by selecting Knowledge from the main Unicenter MP menu bar. In the left pane of the Knowledge page, select Library, Enterprise
Management, Administration, _UMP Administration Wizard.
Scoreboards and Dashboards
Unicenter MP provides two types of views, scoreboards and dashboards. Both views are designed to display a high-level, summarized view of your systems, but they differ in the type of data they gather and the way they present it. The following descriptions describe these differences.
■ A scoreboard is a summarized view that displays statistics for the objects stored in the Management Database, WorldView, or DSM. A scoreboard can include counts for a number of objects in a particular state or a number of events that have occurred during a particular interval. You can access the Portal Explorer from a scoreboard to drill down into an agent and view DSM-managed objects.
■ A dashboard displays real-time information from CA NSM agents. A dashboard lets you combine (on one screen) multiple metrics from one or many agents and one or many hosts. Each metric is presented in an individual tile. Dashboards poll the data from the agents and show the metrics "as is." The dashboard is not a summarized view, and it is not just presenting statistics.
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Scoreboards and Dashboards Distributed with Unicenter MP
Unicenter MP supports several types of scoreboards and dashboards based on WorldView, DSM, Event Management, and other sources of information. A variety of predefined scoreboards and dashboards are distributed with the product, and some of these are included in the predefined workplaces. You can also view the predefined scoreboards and dashboards through the Unicenter MP Knowledge Tree.
Unicenter MP supports the following types of scoreboards and dashboards:
Alert Console
Includes configuration and alert sections and lets you view and react to alerts.
Alert Scoreboard
Includes configuration and alert sections and lets you view and react to a list of alerts with designated display attributes.
DSM-Agent Map Scoreboard
Displays a summary status view of the data monitored by specific agents. Each row of the scoreboard presents details for a single agent.
DSM-Agent View Dashboard
Displays a summary status view of the Unicenter agents you select.
DSM-Host Map Scoreboard
Displays a summary status view of the agent data for a specific host. Each row of the scoreboard presents agent details for a single host.
DSM-Server View Dashboard
Displays a summary status view of the Unicenter servers you select.
Event Console
Shows network activity in the form of event messages. Each event message is displayed, by default, on the Event Console.
Events Scoreboard
Displays a summary view of the Enterprise Management consoles you select.
eHealth Portlets
Lets you publish eHealth portlets (eHealth Business Service Console, eHealth Business Service Console Ticker, and eHealth Reports) for any registered eHealth server. The portlets are published to the eHealth
Performance\Report Server($eHealthServer$) folder in the Unicenter MP Knowledge library, where $eHealthServer$ is the name of the selected server.
Chapter 5: Customizing Your Business Views 193 Spectrum Portlets
Lets you publish portlets for any CA Spectrum server that is connected to Unicenter MP.
Unicenter Service Desk Portlets
Lets you publish the Service Desk portlets from a specific Service Desk server to Unicenter MP.
Unicenter SLA (Service Level Agreement) Scoreboard
Displays a summary view of the SLAs you select.
WV-Agent Status Scoreboard
Displays a summary status of selected Unicenter agents and organizes them by agent type.
WV-Business Process Views Scoreboard
Displays a summary view of the Business Process Views objects you select.
WV-System Status Scoreboard
Displays a summary status of selected Unicenter systems and organizes them by host name.
Unicenter MP Administration
Unicenter MP Administration is a set of tools for setting up, configuring, monitoring, and tuning the Unicenter MP server. Only members of the Admin workgroup have access to Unicenter MP Administration. The Admin workgroup is a default workgroup defined by Unicenter MP.
Unicenter MP provides an Administration Wizard that guides you through the most commonly used administration tasks.
Administering Unicenter MP includes two categories of tasks:
■ General tasks required to administer the Unicenter MP server, including user and workgroup administration, starting and stopping the server, and changing the Admin user password.
■ Tasks required to administer Unicenter NSM components, including setting up connections with the servers running Unicenter NSM and other products, enabling new components, tuning role-based security settings and
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Administration Wizard
Unicenter MP provides an Administration Wizard to guide you through the most commonly used administration tasks. The UMP Administration Wizard is the default workplace for users with admin privileges. Also, as a member of the Admin workgroup, you can access the UMP Administration Wizard from the Knowledge Library under Administration by clicking _UMP Administration Wizard.
Note: Only members of the Admin workgroup have access to the UMP
Administration Wizard. The Admin workgroup is a default workgroup defined by Unicenter MP.
From the wizard, you can launch the following tasks: