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Observability User Guide

4. Explore the workflows

The Observability workflows are a series of dashboards designed to simplify the task of identifying, diagnosing, and resolving problems in your network. Each workflow's dashboards are interconnected and provide varying levels of detail and complexity with views that go from a general overview to specific details. The ability to drill down or zoom out enables you to gain an understanding of your network from multiple perspectives.

Six distinct workflows are available, all with the entry point on cClear's Observability home page. Each workflow starts with an Overview dashboard, which provides a high-level view of your network traffic and health based on user-defined analytics labels. From these Overview dashboards, you can then drill down into Level 1 and Level 2 dashboards to further analyze your network. For advanced troubleshooting, Level 3 and Level 4 dashboards are designed to provide you with detailed data, enabling a thorough understanding of your network's operations.Observability home page

In this section:

A service is a user-defined group of endpoints and, optionally, specific ports that have a singular purpose in the network. This grouping can also be used to define subsets of the network that are managed by specific teams or groups, enabling clear ownership and responsibility.  To define Services, use the Services analytics label in the cClear UI.

A location is a user-defined group of endpoints that identify a physical location within your network topology. Locations can be nested, where one location is entirely contained within another, such as a data center rack, a hospital floor, or a specific building within a campus.  To define Locations, use the Locations analytics label in the cClear UI.

A monitoring point is the location in the network where the monitoring stack captures packets, typically a TAP, SPAN port, or remote SPAN such as ERSPAN, VXLAN, or GRE tunnel. Each monitoring point is uniquely identified by a combination of a cStor and a packet brokering port, such as 'Hoboken FW1 External'. Sources for this identifier include VLANs, cVu ports, or GENEVE VNI. To define monitoring points, use the Monitoring Points analytics label in the cClear UI.

A protocol is the combination of TCP or UDP and a port number used to identify a specific application, also known as a network application. For example, DNS uses port 53, and HTTPS uses port 443. To define protocols, use the Protocols analytics label in the cClear UI.