Once you have the correct monitoring, you usually need to show the status of the monitored servers, or applications. When we use the Operations Manager administrative console, there are quite a few different views available to show the status of the objects, in different views.
A „State Widget” can be used to show the status of monitored objects, gathered into a group.
This requires prior preparation of a group of objects of interest belonging to a specific class.
This usually works quite predictably, until you want to represent the state of clusters placed in a group in this way. Then we suddenly find that the object representing the state is empty:
Such a surprise is not due to some special dislike of clusters, but rather to the treatment of cluster objects as subsequent (nested) groups, as seen in the Authoring section:
Each cluster is treated here as a subgroup.
The view we created contains a non-configurable (from the wizard) setting for expanding groups up to the last level.
The wizard does not give you the ability to control the level of recess of the objects shown, but you can influence this parameter by editing the XML. The variable controlling the level of recess is RecursionLevel, set by default to -1, which means „infinity.”.
This is the reason for the observed effect: there is an expansion of the contents of the groups all the way to the end, so we will not get objects of the Windows Cluster class, but various objects placed inside. Since only objects of other classes than the one indicated in the view settings are available, so of course nothing is displayed. If we set the parameter to zero we would prohibit the expansion of groups.
In this case, we will get a completely useless state of the cluster group itself (as unmonitored it contributes nothing):
As you can easily guess, it will be appropriate to expand the groups by one level (+1 value). This will allow you to look inside the group with cluster objects, but not to further develop their contents as more groups. XML notation:
Now we actually get the status of the monitored clusters:
Of course, when making changes to the XML, remember to first export the necessary Management Pack containing the monitoring visualization, and save the versions before and after making changes (to keep the ability to return to the previous state).