Topology View in ITM 6.1 FP03

If you have upgraded to fixpack 03, you will see one more binary tree like icon added to the toolbar in your TEPS client. The view is called topology view and it is pretty cool. Please read on to learn more about it..

What is a topology view?

Have you ever spent quite a few hours to come up with an architectural diagram of your installation in Visio only to realize it became quickly outdated in a few months time? Wouldn't it be cool if the product itself could generate the architectural diagram dynamically? That is exactly this topology view does and may be little more.

How do I see the topology view?

Click on Enterprise in TEPS Client. Now click on the "Topology View" icon on the toolbar (a binary-tree like icon connecting three nodes) and click on an empty view. There you go!

What do I see in the topology view?

You will see all the ITM components in a visio-like diagram. If you hover your mouse over a particular node in the topology view, you will see details for the node such as its name, status (Online or Offline), type, product code, last heartbeat time, version and IP address. Very useful!

What else I can do with topology view?

You can obviously save this in your workspace, so you will always have the latest and greatest architectural diagram whenever you need it. Also, you can print this view, zoom in and zoom out the diagram by dragging the slider to the right and left. By clicking "Fit to View" button next to the slider, you can make the whole diagram appear within your view area. By clicking the "View as Table" button, you can view the data displayed in a table format instead of topology view. You can also do filtering on each column in the table view (e.g. listing all Offline systems). Also, there is an Overview button to get a smaller thumbnail-like picture of the diagram.

By right clicking on the topology view and clicking Configure, you can control when to display table view and when to display this topology diagram.

Are there any gotchas?

Yes. For the node types that do not appear in "tacmd listsystems", such as TEPS, NODE (which is the host with mutliple agents running), the topology/table view incorrectly states that they are offline even though the underlying agents appear as Online.

Also, it would be nice if there is a feature to export this information into a commonly accessible format such as Visio/Excel.