MMS Console Overview

The MMS web console provides an extensive set of features for analyzing the statistics collected by the MMS agent. For a basic overview of the console, see the usage documentation. This document provides a more in-deptnh guide of the MMS console.

Host Statistics

In the “Hosts” section, click any hostname link to view the data collected from that process. The charts on this “Host Statistics” page are interactive, and provide tools for navigating and working with the MMS data. Click on the “info” buttons with an i in a circle to raise informational boxes, to explore the functionality of the MMS console and charts.

Global Page Controls

There are three to five items in the line below the MMS Console’s menu bar. From left to right, these are:

• The hostname and port of the process. This is a link to the raw JSON content of the latest information gathered from this host.
• The host type. Possible types include: “primary,” “secondary,” “master,” “slave,” “standalone,” “recovering,” and “unknown.”
• Optionally, the name of the replica set to which this process belongs. Only replica set members have this value. The name of the set links to a page with all of the charts from all members of a set.
• Optionally, the name of the shard cluster to which this process belongs. Only shard cluster members have this value.
• The version of MongoDB running on this process.

The second line contains nine links that control the host statistics page. MMS displays the current selection in a larger font. In the second line there is a “window” selector that narrows the amount of data displayed. These options are:

• “by minute,” which is the default setting. All charts plot one data point per minute. The “window” options are:
  • “one hour,” which is the default window for this selection and charts 1 hour of data.
  • “six hours,” which charts 6 hours of data.
  • “twelve hours,” which charts 12 hours of data.
  • “twenty-four hours,” which charts 24 hours of data.
• “by 5min,” which re-plots all charts with five-minute averages. The “window” options are:
  • “six hours,” which charts 6 hours of data.
  • “twelve hours,” which charts 12 hours of data.
  • “twenty-four hours,” which is the default window for this selection and charts 24 hours of data.
  • “forty-eight hours,” which charts 24 hours of data.
• “by hour,” which re-plots all charts with hourly averages. The “window” options are:
  • “one day,” which charts 1 day of data.
  • “one week,” which charts 1 week of data.
  • “two weeks,” which charts 2 weeks of data.
  • “one month,” which is the default window for this selection and charts 1 month of data.
  • “two months,” which charts 2 months of data.
• “by day,” which re-plots the chart to display a period of time greater than 24 hours. The “window” options are:
  • “one week,” which charts 1 week of data.
  • “two weeks,” which charts 2 weeks of data.
  • “one month,” which is the default window for this selection and charts 1 month of data
  • “six months,” which charts 6 months of data.
  • “one year,” which charts 1 year of data.

• “range,” which allows you to specify a time rage for the charts to display.
• “avg/sec,” which is the default setting. When selected, charts display the average number of events per second.
• “total,” which allows you to re-plot the charts to display the total number of events.
• “gmt,” which allows you to re-plot the charts to the GMT zone. Use this option when correlating MMS data with server logs in GMT rather than your local timezone.
• “refresh,” which triggers a refresh of all charts.

On the next line, a slider allows you to change the scope of all charts at once. Move the sliders on either end of this bar to narrow all of the charts on this page at once.

Note

The “Personalization” section of the “Settings” tab provides an interface to set a default chart display type (e.g. “avg/sec,”) epoch type (e.g. “by day,”) and window (e.g. “six months.”)

Specific Chart Controls

You may also interact with the charts individually. Using the mouse you can:

• Click-and-drag to select a portion of the chart to zoom into.
• Double-click to revert to the default zoom setting.
• Shift-click-and-drag (i.e. hold the shift key while clicking and dragging) to scroll left and right.

Each MMS chart has several controls at the top right of the chart container in the “chart toolbar.” From left to right, these controls are:

• “Zoom Out,” a magnifying glass with a minus sign, reverts the chart to the default zoom setting. This item only appears when you have zoomed into the chart.
• “Add To Dashboard,” a plus sign, takes you to a dashboard creation page where you can create a new dashboard and add a collection of charts to the new dashboard.
• “Zoom In,” a magnifying glass with a plus sign, raises a box with a larger version of the chart.
• “Link,” a chain, links to a page that only displays this chart.
• “Email Chart,” an envelope, raises a dialogue box where you can input an email address and short message to send the chart to an arbitrary email address.
• “Info,” the character i in a circle, raises a box with a key to the chart.

Chart Annotations

Annotations may appear as colored vertical lines on your charts to indicate various server events. The following color/event combinations are:

• A red bar indicates a server restart.
• A purple bar indicates the server is now a primary.
• A yellow bar indicates the server is now a secondary.

If you do not wish to see the chart annotations, you can disable them on the “Setting” page.

Host Aliases

The Edit button (e.g. “pencil”) in every row of the left column in the Hosts page opens an interface so that you can create a host aliases for the hosts you monitor with MMS. These aliases is arbitrary, and are useful if your machines have existing hostnames that do not sufficiently describe the system in the context of MMS. Port numbers are not appended to host aliases.

Dashboards

With MMS dashboards, you can create customized collections of charts for easier data analysis. You can access the “Dashboard” section of the MMS console from the first button in the menu bar at the top of the console interface. You can configure MMS to automatically load a dashboard rather than the Hosts page from the MMS settings interface.

You can create multiple dashboards as your needs dictate. Use the plus icon at the top of the page to specify a name and create a new dashboard, or select “New Dashboard...” when adding a chart to a dashboard . You can rename or remove a dashboard from links on the bottom of a dashboard page. Dashboards have the same chart controls as the host statistics pages.

Adding and Removing Charts from Dashboards

You can add any MMS chart to any dashboard with the plus sign (e.g. “+”) in the chart toolbars.

To remove a chart from a dashboard, navigate to the dashboard and select the minus sign (e.g. “-”) icon in the chart toolbar.

Advanced Dashboard Creation

When adding a new dashboard, you can select the “advanced create or append to dashboard” link to create a dashboard that includes a custom selection of charts, or a collection of charts from a dynamically assembled list of hosts. From this page, you may create new dashboards or append new charts to existing dashboards. You can filter the included processes by host type.

Specify the list of hosts to include in this dashboard by selecting a replica set or shard cluster or writing a regular expression to match monitored processes’ hostnames. The “Host Alias In Regexp” check box allows you to, if checked, use the regular expression to select the aliased hostname you configured, rather than the actual hostname. Below the host configuration options you may toggle an option to “group hosts in chart,” which creates a single composite chart for all matching charts.

Below this, there are 17 chart types that you can use to select charts for this dashboard. Below the chart selection, the final row of buttons allows you to: (optionally) test the “host regexp” to ensure that your regular expression is sufficiently selective; preview the charts that this operation will add to the dashboard; and submit these changes to the dashboards.

You can add and remove charts to these dashbaords manually. You may also add additional charts using the “advanced create dashboard” functionality in the future by specifying an existing dashboard in the first field.

User Management

You can grant additional users access to your Jira group and MMS console in the “Admins” section of the MMS console. Please note that in order to add a user via the MMS admin console, the user must already exist in Jira, as the same authorization and authentication service is used for both Jira and MMS.

Reminder for Commercial Support clients: Any Jira user that you grant access to your MMS console will also have read and write privileges to both the console and all tickets filed with this group name in Jira’s Commercial Support project.

Users can create Jira accounts on the “account registration page”, or through Jira by going to http://jira.mongodb.org/.

Once they have an account set up, you can add them to your Jira group and MMS console by clicking on the plus (+) icon next to your account name at the top of the MMS Admins console and entering their Jira username in the dialogue that appears.

If you’re not sure if the user has a preexisting Jira account or if you’re not sure of their username, you can enter their email address in the dialogue as stated above. If the console finds an account, the user will automatically be added to your Jira group and the MMS console.

If you are using MMS groups, you can create secondary groups to segregate monitored servers and users within a group. You can remove users from a group at any time from the Admins page. To remove a group, remove all users and then remove your own user account from the group.

In general, all users attached to your account have both read and write privileges for your MMS group, as well as the ability to add new users to the group. Grant others access with great care.

Note

If you create an account in Jira or make any changes to that account from within Jira, it can take up to 30 minutes for that change to propagate to MMS. During this window you cannot add a user to a group in MMS. Also, passwords changed in Jira are subject to the same propagation delay for MMS accounts.