War Rooms

War Rooms are flexible containers for organizing nodes and viewing key metrics in real time. By adding many distributed nodes to a War Room, you can use different views and dashboards to view your infrastructure on a single pane of glass. Then, when an anomaly strikes, drill down into single-node dashboards for every granular detail you need for root cause analysis.

The default view for any War Room is the Nodes view, but you can also use the Overview, or create new dashboards from within War Rooms.

The utility bar

At the top of every War Room is its utility bar. This bar helps you navigate through the various views and dashboards available for a given War Room. Each utility bar contains three items: the View dropdown, the node filter, and the time picker.

View dropdown

The View dropdown lets you choose between various dashboards for monitoring your infrastructure. You can currently choose between the Overview, Nodes view, and creating new dashboards, along with any specific dashboards you might have created already.

Node filter

The node filter allows you to quickly filter the nodes visualized in a War Room's views. It appears on the Overview and Nodes view, but not on single-node dashboards or new dashboards you might have created.

Use relational operators (==, !=, contains, and !contains) and logical operators (AND, OR), plus the name, OS, or services running on your nodes to quickly turn any War Room into a focused troubleshooting interface. See what services Netdata Cloud can filter by in the supported collectors list.

For example, name == centos OR os == debian filters any nodes by the exact name centos or has Debian as its operating system.

You can also use parentheses around operators to create more sophisticated filters. (name contains aws AND os contains ubuntu) OR services == apache shows only nodes that have aws in the hostname and are Ubuntu-based, or any nodes that have an Apache webserver running on them.

If a filter is invalid or incomplete, Netdata Cloud shows a warning and will not run the filter until it's corrected.

Metric Correlations

When viewing a single-node dashboard, the Metric Correlations button appears in the utility bar. Click this button to use Netdata Cloud's built-in metrics correlation feature, which is designed to help you find the root cause of anomalies faster.

Time & date picker

By default, all visualizations in Netdata Cloud show the last 15 minutes of metrics data.

The time picker helps you select precise timeframes you want to investigate further. It appears in the Overview, Nodes view, single-node dashboards, and new dashboards you might have created.

Use the Quick Selector to show metrics from the last 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 6 hours, 12 hours, or 7 days.

Beneath the Quick Selector is an input field and dropdown you use in combination to select a specific timeframe of minutes, hours, days, or months. Enter a number and choose the appropriate unit of time.

Use the calendar to select multiple days. Click on a date to begin the timeframe selection, then an ending date.

Click Apply to re-render all visualizations with new metrics data streamed to your browser from each distributed node. Click Clear to remove any changes and apply the default 15-minute timeframe.

The fields beneath the calendar display the beginning and ending timestamps of the timeframe selected.

War Room organization

We recommend a few strategies for organizing your War Rooms.

Service, purpose, location, etc.: You can group War Rooms by a service (think Nginx, MySQL, Pulsar, and so on), their purpose (webserver, database, application), their physical location, whether they're baremetal or a Docker container, the PaaS/cloud provider it runs on, and much more. This allows you to see entire slices of your infrastructure by moving from one War Room to another.

End-to-end apps/services: If you have a user-facing SaaS product, or an internal service that said product relies on, you may want to monitor that entire stack in a single War Room. This might include Kubernetes clusters, Docker containers, proxies, databases, web servers, brokers, and more. End-to-end War Rooms are valuable tools for ensuring the health and performance of your organization's essential services.

Incident response: You can also create new War Rooms as one of the first steps in your incident response process. For example, you have a user-facing web app that relies on Apache Pulsar for a message queue, and one of your nodes using the Pulsar collector begins reporting a suspiciously low messages rate. You can create a War Room called $year-$month-$day-pulsar-rate, add all your Pulsar nodes in addition to nodes they connect to, and begin diagnosing the root cause in a War Room optimized for getting to resolution as fast as possible.

Add War Rooms

You can add new War Rooms to any Space by clicking on the green plus icon + next the War Rooms heading.

A new panel slides in and prompts you to name the new War Room, give it a description, and choose whether it's public or private. Anyone in your Space can join public War Rooms, but can only join private War Rooms with an invitation.

Manage War Rooms

If you're an administrator of War Room, you can change its settings. Use the top navigation to click on the War Room's name, then Manage War Room to open the configuration panel.

In the Nodes tab, click the green plus icon + to add a claimed node to the War Room. Click on the 3-dot icon ⋮ next to any claimed node to remove it from the War Room.

In the Users tab, see which users from your Space are allowed to view the War Room. Click the green plus icon + and look under the Space users eligible to join this war room heading to find existing users you can add to the War Room. If they don't appear in that list, you need to invite them first.

In the War Rom tab, change the War Room's name, description, or public/private status. You can also delete the War Room with the Delete button.

What's next?

Once you've figured out an organizational structure that works for your team, learn more about how you can use Netdata Cloud to monitor distributed nodes using real-time composite charts.