Use navigators in Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring đź”—
In Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, a navigator is a collection of resources that lets you monitor metrics and logs across various instances of your services and detect outliers in the instance population based on key performance indicators. Resources in a navigator include, but are not limited to, a full list of entities, dashboards, related alerts and detectors, and service dependencies.
View all navigators đź”—
To see all navigators, select Infrastructure from the Splunk Observability Cloud home page.
On the Infrastructure Monitoring landing page, each card represents a navigator, corresponding to the services you monitor in Splunk Observability Cloud. A navigator card shows a count of instances in the population and highlights critical alerts linked to that population.
Drill down đź”—
In heat map view, when you hover over a square in a navigator, you can see the information about the instance represented by the square. Click a square to drill down into that instance.
Alternatively, while in table view, you can click the instance ID of an instance to drill down into that instance.
For example, if you click a square representing a host instance, you can see system metrics information in the built-in dashboard with charts. You can also find various properties of the host, processes running on the host, and so on on the Properties sidebar.
Note
The color or statistics for an element might change as you drill down or click through your system. This is because the information might be refreshed between the time you begin navigating and the time a target element is displayed.
As you drill down into a single instance, you can use the breadcrumb trail to switch to the drilldown view of another instance or to return to the navigator view.
Use the Dashboard section đź”—
The Dashboard section contains built-in dashboards that provide access to detailed information about the instances displayed.
Dashboards in navigators are read‑only, so you can’t directly make any changes to them. However, you can clone a built-in dashboard to make changes to the clone, or download a built-in dashboard. As an admin, you can also add or remove custom dashboards, and hide any built-in dashboards that you don’t use.
To learn more, see Clone a built-in dashboard in a navigator and Export a built-in dashboard in a navigator in the Built-in dashboards documentation.
Note
Amazon EC2, GCP Compute Engine, and Azure Virtual Machines instances are powered by their respective public cloud services as well as the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector. You need both for all the charts to display data in the built-in dashboards.
If you have only the public cloud service and the Smart Agent configured, some charts in the built-in dashboards for Amazon EC2, GCP Compute Engine, and Azure Virtual Machines instances display no data.
If you have only the public cloud service configured, you can see all the cards representing the services where data come from, but some charts in the built-in dashboards for Amazon EC2, GCP Compute Engine, and Azure Virtual Machines instances display no data.
If you have only Smart Agent configured, Amazon EC2, GCP Compute Engine, and Azure Virtual Machines instance navigators aren’t available.
View dependencies in the navigator sidebar đź”—
In the navigator sidebar, you can track the dependencies for:
Kubernetes containers.
Hosts (My Data Center hosts, virtual hosts, Amazon EC2 hosts, Azure Virtual Machines, and Google Cloud Platform hosts).
Services running on Kubernetes containers or hosts.
The following table describes the content displayed in the Dependencies section of the sidebar for different navigators:
Navigator |
What you see in the Dependencies section |
|---|---|
Kubernetes navigators |
The services and hosts that are running on the Kubernetes entity. |
Host navigators |
|
Other navigators |
The Kubernetes entities or hosts that the services are running on. |
Best practice đź”—
To get the most out of the navigator sidebar, configure the services you want to track in the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector configuration file as service.name values under extraDimensions. By configuring service.name values, you can see more details about your data, such as which individual services are running on specific host instances.
Example đź”—
For example, the redis-cart service is included in this Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector configuration.
receiver_creator:
receivers:
smartagent/redis:
rule: type == "pod" && name contains "redis"
config:
type: collectd/redis
host: redis-cart
port: 6379
extraDimensions:
service.name: redis-cart
For more information on the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector configuration, see Collector components.
Navigate to services using the navigator sidebar đź”—
The following example shows you how to navigate to a Cassandra service from the Amazon EC2 navigator, assuming you have the Cassandra service.name configured.
In this Amazon EC2 navigator, Cassandra and Kafka services are running on the Amazon EC2 instances. Each tile in the navigator sidebar represents a service type.
To see the full list of Cassandra services, hover over or select the Cassandra tile.
To search for a specific service, type the name of the service in the search field.
Note
You can only search when there are configured services. If no individual services are configured, the search bar doesn’t appear.
When you have a large number of running service types or services, the navigator sidebar might hide some of them and instead display the text Show all services. Use search to find a specific service without having to expand the entire list.
For example, type
metadatato look for service names containing the keyword.
Select a Cassandra service to navigate to the navigator or dashboard for that service. When both navigator and dashboard are available for a service, clicking that service opens the navigator.
View alerts using navigators đź”—
If a service has any active alerts, you can view a list of the service’s alerts through navigators.
Select Infrastructure from the Splunk Observability Cloud home page.
Search for the navigator that you want to view.
Under the navigator title, select the text displaying the number of alerts. Alert numbers and types vary depending on the navigator.
For the following example navigator, the user selected 90 Critical alerts.
Selecting this text opens a detailed view of the navigator with a list of active alerts shown on the sidebar.
View navigators using alerts đź”—
When you’re investigating an alert, you can refer at a glance to Infrastructure in the Next Steps section of the modal window displaying that alert. The section displays a link to the relevant Infrastructure Monitoring navigator. Select that link to open the navigator without losing contextual metadata from the alert. Applicable metadata passes automatically from the alert to the navigator.
Variable data passed from alerts to navigators includes the time that the alert occurred as well as relevant metrics and properties from the alert.
By linking alerts in real time with the navigators that triggered them, the “alert to navigator” experience makes troubleshooting faster.
Remove an inactive navigator đź”—
Note
You need to be an admin to remove a navigator.
When data for an integration hasn’t been received for 72 hours, the navigator for that integration becomes inactive, and you have the option remove it from view. The navigator automatically reappears if data for the integration is received again.
Follow these steps to remove an inactive navigator:
Select Infrastructure from the Splunk Observability Cloud home page. You can only remove a navigator when you’re in the Infrastructure Monitoring landing page view.
On an inactive navigator, select Remove Navigator.
Confirm your selection.