Seafelt Charts: The Healthbar

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Today I’m going to explain one of the best features of seafelt Reporter and its charting engine: the HealthBar™.

The HealthBar is a feature unique to seafelt Reporter; you won’t find it in any other tool (AFAIK). It’s a really useful feature. Here’s why:

When you poll a device for information, you’re collecting statistics about how many packets it sent in the last 5 minutes, or how much CPU it’s using, or something similar. You might be pinging the device to make sure it’s online. Great, but what if the device isn’t online? What if the polling software itself isn’t online? What if you don’t know if the remote device is on or not?

Knowing What You Don’t Know

With seafelt, we treat this lack of information as important; most other tools just ignore it. Take a look at this chart:

Hmm. It looks like there wasn’t much going on over on the left, then some traffic happened, then it was pretty quiet, then there’s some more traffic. It must have been pretty quiet around midday yesterday.

Ok, now let’s look at the same data, but this time we’ll add in the HealthBar:

The HealthBar runs along the base of the chart, giving you extra information about the element. You can see here that it’s mostly green. That means the element was online, and we were able to collect data from it. But what’s that there on the left? There’s a gap! Without the HealthBar, you might have thought there was no traffic at the time, but it turns out that might be wrong! The white space indicates that SPM doesn’t know anything about that time period. This is very different from there not being any traffic, or the device being offline.

This helps you when you’re troubleshooting, because without the HealthBar, it’s easy to make assumptions about information you don’t have. But what about devices that are online, but aren’t working correctly? The HealthBar helps you there, too.

Broken Elements

If something is wrong with an element, and we know there’s something wrong, the HealthBar will show you, like this:

Without the HealthBar, how would you know the interface went offline? Maybe this interface is usually very quiet, so no traffic is normal? Aha, but with the HealthBar, we can see that it went offline at about 15:00 on Thursday, and is still down.

With the HealthBar, it’s really easy to see if an element has problems, even if you’ve got dozens (or hundreds!) of element charts in front of you.

Interface Flapping

Here’s another really useful troubleshooting case: an interface that is constantly coming up and down, or flapping. With other tools, you might see the traffic and assume everything is ok; it might just be a bit slow. In this example, the interface has about 8% lower throughput than normal while it’s flapping. With seafelt Reporter, you can immediately see that the interface is flapping up and down.

In Conclusion

One of the reasons we built seafelt was to help with diagnosing problems with IT systems. Sometimes knowing that you don’t know something is extremely useful in working out what’s wrong. The seafelt HealthBar is a really simple, but powerful idea. We hope you like it as much as we do.