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Monitoring templates are an incredibly powerful feature within Panopta. They enable you to scale your monitoring in a cohesive and consistent way. Taking templates a step further with pattern matching allows your monitoring strategy to scale in an automated fashion

A brief example

Let's say you want to monitor every network interface that starts with "eth" across every server. In the past, this would be very time-consuming. With pattern matching, however, you can create a single interface-related check on a template - say Bandwidth In - and use "eth*" for wildcard pattern matching. Now, every time you apply this template to a server, it will add a metric for every interface that starts with "eth" on the server. Even better, you can have this matching be performed every time meta-data discovery is performed. If new resources are discovered that match your pattern, metrics will be created for them automatically.

Try it yourself

Let's see how this works, step by step.

  1. Create a new template.
  2. On the newly created template's details page, click the Monitoring Config tab. 
  3. Click Add Monitoring. 
  4. From the catalog, look for the Linux card then click Add.
  5. With the Linux metrics drawer now open, click Add for kb in for the mon.
  6. Click the Filters tab.
  7. Enable the Filter by Interface option.
  8. Select from the following options:
    • Positive match - allows you to supply alpha-numeric characters and wildcards * to match against resources. For example, if your network interfaces were eth01, eth02, and nic01, you could match just the first two with eth*. When you apply the template, only the first two interfaces would have monitoring added.
    • Negative match - is as you would expect, the opposite. By providing a pattern of eth* would lead to only the nic01 interface to have monitoring added to it.
  9. Click Save.

Now your template has a single metric on it. You'll notice in the monitoring table, the metric that you just added has the pattern matching rule next to its name as a friendly reminder.

Now, let's apply this template to some servers. The steps are detailed in Apply server templates.

    Now if you visit any of the servers you applied the template to, you'll see a metric that has been created for every network interface which the Panopta agent had previously discovered on the given server.