Create and Manage Topologies
This topic outlines how to create and manage topologies in Moogsoft Enterprise. Topologies let you view alerts and Situations according to the relationships that are important to you. See Topology Overview for more information.
Before you begin
Before you begin to create and configure topologies in Moogsoft Enterprise, ensure you have met the following requirements:
You know the details of the topologies, nodes and links you want to create.
If you want to use the Topologies API or the Topology Loader utility to create topologies, your Moogsoft Enterprise user has the super_privileges role permission. See Role Permissions for more information.
If you want to load one or more large topologies, you have generated maps of the connected nodes in .csv files. See Load a Topology for more information.
Create topologies
You can use the Topologies API to create and manage small topologies, but this is impractical for large topologies. If your topology .csv file is larger than 40 MB Moogsoft recommends using the Topology Loader utility.
Each topology has a status:
Active: You can use the Topology as a source in a Recipe's topology filter.
Inactive: You cannot use the Topology to filter a Recipe. You can set a topology to inactive while you are creating it or when you are updating it. See Maintain topologies.
See Topologies API and Graph Topology for a full description of the API endpoints and Moobot module methods.
See Load a Topology for more information about the Topology Loader utility.
Maintain topologies
Moogsoft Enterprise includes mechanisms for keeping topologies current and up-to-date.
You can use the clone and replace endpoints in the Topologies API to clone an active topology, make changes to the inactive clone, and then replace the active topology with the updated version. This optional feature means that you do not need to take your topologies offline in order to update them.
Cluster alerts by topology
To cluster alerts in a single topology, filter on a named topology.
Inferred topology
If you want to cluster alerts in several topologies from a single Recipe, perform the following steps. Note that alerts in separate topologies are clustered into separate Situations.
You may find this useful if you have split a single large topology into several smaller topologies, and you do not want to create a Recipe for each one.
Configure a workflow to set the corresponding name of the topology in the
custom_info.moog_topologyattribute of your alerts. See populateNamedTopology for more information.Configure a Recipe to filter on an inferred topology. The Recipe obtains the topology name from
custom_info.moog_topology.Set the Recipe's Node Field to the alert field that contains the topology node. The Recipe checks whether the node exists in the topology named in
custom_info.moog_topology. If it does, the alert is included in the filter.Set the Recipe's Match property as follows:
Any node: The Recipe checks whether the alert is from any node in the same topology as the node represented by the reference alert in the Situation.
Nodes within: The Recipe checks whether the alert is from a node within a specified hop limit of the node represented by the reference alert in the Situation.
Note
To cluster all alerts from the same node, add a clustering attribute at 100% similarity. Use the same attribute that you are using for your Topology Node Field.
See Configure a Cookbook Recipe for more information on the Recipe topology filter.
Vertex Entropy
Vertex Entropy is a Moogsoft Enterprise algorithm that indicates the critical nodes within your topologies and their tendency to produce important events.
The Graph Analyser process calculates the Vertex Entropy for all nodes in your topologies. It processes topology changes every 30 seconds as part of Housekeeper.
For more information on configuring Vertex Entropy, see Configure Topology-based Clustering with Vertex Entropy.
If you do not want to use the Vertex Entropy feature, you can turn off the Graph Analyser process in Housekeeper to reduce load on your Moogsoft Enterprise system. To do this, go to Settings > Vertex Entropy in the Moogsoft Enterprise UI.
View Situation topology
When a Situation affects more than one topological node, Moogsoft Enterprise presents a visual representation of the topologies impacted by the Situation. See View Situation Topology for more details.