Palantir Help and Information

General

The Palantir Web-interface is composed of a couple of HTML-files and a couple of CGI-scripts. The CGI-scripts uses cookies to maintain state in the otherwise stateless HTTP-protocol. The Palantir documentation:

Palantir Paper
Palantir Technical
Palantir Install
FAQ

may give answers to some questions.

Sorting and selections

The "Palantir Machine Status" page shows a list of Palantir nodes. The node may be sorted, grouped and restricted in many ways. To begin with, there are two pulldown menus at the top of the page which enable some limitation of the dataset and sorting. In addition to this there are a number of checkboxes which enables selection or de-selection of types of alarms. If further configuration is needed there is a button at the lower left corner of the page named "Configure GUI" leading to the Palantir HTML Configuration section.

Sorting and selection in detail

"Show:"

 The Show: pulldown lets the user restrict the group of nodes on which to focus on. It might be that the user is a NT-administrator and only wants to view the Windows nodes. Or more typically, if you have a lot of nodes, you usually only want to display the nodes witch actually have an error situation in the list.

"Sort:"

 The Sort: pulldown lets the user sort the nodes displayed on a specific criteria, i.e displaying the nodelist with nodes having the gravest error situations on top might be useful, other times a list sorted on machine load proves useful.
Hierarchical
 The Hierarchical sorting makes it possible to view nodes in a hierarchical structure. The structure might be based on information tagged to each node that describes the organizational belonging of the node. This is particularly useful when having a lot of nodes, and different system administrators having just sub-domain interests and authority.
Alphabetically
 This presents all nodes matching the current Show: criteria sorted alphabetically after node name.
by Alarm Severity
 This presents all nodes matching the current Show: criteria sorted after the total graveness of the alarms present for the node.
by Alarm Age
 This presents all nodes matching the current Show: criteria sorted after alarm ages.
by Load
 This presents all nodes matching the current Show: criteria sorted after node load(UNIX)/%CPU used(Windows).
by Uptime
 This presents all nodes matching the current Show: criteria sorted after node uptime.
by #Users
 This presents all nodes matching the current Show: criteria sorted after the total number of users presently logged in on the node.
by #Processes
 This presents all nodes matching the current Show: criteria sorted after the number of processes in the process table.
by Swap Conf
 This presents all nodes matching the current Show: criteria sorted after configured swap/page space.
by Swap Used
 This presents all nodes matching the current Show: criteria sorted after used swap/page space.

Checkboxes

 The Checkboxes is there to manipulate which alarm types that is to be shown. For most users i.e. the Internal- and/or Net-alarms will be uninteresting, because these says more about system status than node status.
Disk
 Toggles showing or hiding of Disk related messages, default ON.
Proc
 Toggles showing or hiding of Process/Job related messages, default ON.
File
 Toggles showing or hiding of File/NoFile related messages, default ON.
HW
 Toggles showing or hiding of Hardware related messages, default ON.
Module
 Toggles showing or hiding of messages related to execution of Palantir modules, default ON.
Net
 Toggles showing or hiding of Network/Connectivity related messages. Messages about whether client listens to the dedicated palantir port also have type Net even though the problem may be due to a miss-configured inetd. Default OFF.
Intern
 Toggles showing or hiding of various Palantir Internal messages, typically internal errors or miss-configurations, default OFF.
Cleared
 Toggles showing or hiding of Cleared alarms. An alarm may be cleared from the display for a shorter period of time. Default OFF.
Acleared
 Toggles showing or hiding of Automatically Cleared alarms. An alarm may be automatically cleared if it does no longer meet the conditions for an active alarm. Default OFF.
Sleeped
 Toggles showing or hiding of Sleeped alarms. An alarm may be put permanently to sleep. Default OFF.
Flash
 Toggles showing or hiding of NEW () and OLD () tags. is displayed if the alarm is less than 2 hours "old". Age is defined as time since the alarm-instance was first seen. tags all alarms of age greater than one week (7 days). Default ON

Configure GUI

 In the Configure GUI-section it is important to press the "Update" button to make changes take effect. This section enables specification of additional info-fields in the nodelist, de-selection of nodes that match certain meta-data, it enables setting of mail-Reply-To and mail-Signature.
Display in
nodelist:
 The Display in nodelist lets you specify whether or not some meta-information shall be listed for each node in the nodelist. This is done by clicking on the so that it changes to a E.g if you specify for "HARDWARE", you get a nodelist listing hardware information together with "Host", "Type" and "Message".
Expand /
investigate:
 The Expand / investigate lets you specify that nodes with a meta-info-field matching a certain value shall not be listed in the nodelist. An example here is that it is possible to specify that nodes having "SOFTWARE" = "Ultrix" shall no longer be listed, an other thing this is useful for is to eliminate parts of an organization from ones view.
Reply-To:
 The Reply-To-field lets you specify a Reply-To/From mail-address. This is used when sending mail from nodestatus.
Signature:
 The Signature-field lets you specify a (multi-line) signature.

Navigation

From the nodelist it is possible to jump to a nodestatus page for each node. This can be done by either clicking on a node-name or icon, by clicking on the alarm message or by typing in a node-name in the Jump To-section.

Nodename

 The nodename, the machine type icon and the alarm message can all be clicked on to reach a nodestatus display. If you are determined to send a mail, you might as well click on the envelope which takes you directly to a nodestatus display with an expanded mail section.

Jump To

 The Jump To-field is located at top-right corner of the page. When having typed in a nodename, press return or click on the "Update"-button.

Div

Envelopes

 Clicking on a envelope is a fast way of jumping to a node staus display with the mail section expanded. There are three diferent envelopes. The differences is ment to give a hint of what mail-actions have been taken lately:

indicates that no mail has been sent for this node the last 3 days.

indicates that mail has been sent a while ago (8 hours - 3 days ago).

indicates that mail has recently been sent (for less than 8 hours ago).

The nodes appearing in ITALIC font are Auto Configured nodes

Nodes with unverified configuration - which is the state of the node configuration after it has been autoconfigured but before an operator has manually verified the configuration - is displayed in italic font. This is to mark the node out against the regular nodes.