NetBrain’s data view function gives you the ability to monitor various public data in NetBrain environment. This chapter will focus on explaining how NetBrain system manages to visualize the data from public cloud providers in its dynamic map. There are basically two kinds of data that can visualized by NetBrain:

•Public Cloud Infrastructure Data: this involves the basic information of cloud operational status, routing/security, tag information etc.

•Cloud Monitoring Metrics: this involves the monitoring metrics from the cloud native monitoring tools, such as AWS CloudWatch and Azure Monitoring. These metrics are usually data plane status that can be visualized in NetBrain maps.

In order to visualize the relevant data using DVT, you can leverage the following two types of data:

•GDR Data: GDR data is already available for use since this type of data is retrieved during the discovery/benchmark process.

•API Parser Data:  By using the API parser, you can retrieve any data from public cloud provider.

 

Building Data View Template with Public Cloud GDR Data

Since NetBrain uses API to retrieve the data from AWS for the related networking objects, the system makes some of these data available for you to select when using the data view template. You can re-organize and select the data you want to use in data view template based on your specific needs.

In order to select these data, you need to select the branch type first and then click the Select Built-in Data option.

The following screenshot demonstrates the data you can select for the elastic load balancer. The selectable data will vary according to the type of network object.

Note: Since the selected data is retrieved from the GDR stored in MongoDB, when you apply the Data View including the AWS GDR data, these data is cached from the system and will be retrieved during the latest discover/benchmark process. The data presented is infrastructure data and rarely changes.

Building Data View Template with API Parser Data

To retrieve more types of data from AWS (e.g., live CloudWatch data), you will need to use the API parser to retrieve the data from AWS and then select respective Parser Variables. As the API parser data can be retrieved from live network with desired frequency, you can use this method to build your Data View Template if you need to pull the data from live.

Tip: To learn more about sample data view templates, refer to Feature Summary - Public Cloud Support.

 

See also:

Using Data View to Decode Network Design and Troubleshoot

Creating a Data View Template