Overview

The Umbrella Management Center is supposed to be the Central Point of Information in a System Management Center. With the UMC the System Manager can easily organize his SMC, coordinate and control the daily work. The powerful Open Source Application is based on LAMP

Linux
Apache
MySQL
PHP

The UMC runs on PHP 4, but can easily be upgraded to PHP 5. Same applies to the underlying MySQL 4 Database.It can store easily some million records and is designed to provide best possible performance.

3 Level Access Control

Before you can start, you need an UMC-Login, which you will get from the UMC-Manager, by creating a user in the User-Form. The UMC-Login is just an application Login, not passed to the MySQL database underneath. In high security environments, the UMC will log each Login attempt checkng the user's ipaddress to exclude, that another user is trying to hack your account. For security reasons, your account will be locked, after 3 bad logins. Moreover, each Input Form is protected by a form-password. Bad form-passwords will also lock your accont after 3 attempts, of course. If the UMC locks an account, it will also create an Alarm, which will rise in severity, if 10 Bad Logins have been exceeded.

Thus, it is impossible to hack the UMC, without notice, provided you use at least not easy to guess 6 byte passwords. Apart from that, in standard configuration it is technically impossible to login to the MySQL database from the network.

Forms

Standard Forms

Customer Information is typed in or collected by probes automatically.
In order to type in Information and display it, there are 15 Standard Forms

Service Providers
Trouble Tickets
TCP-Services
UMC Users
WebTickets
Customers
Meetings
Contacts
Licenses
Projects
Devices
Alarms
Orders
Errors
Calls
etc.

Private Forms

The UMC Form Generator can easily create private Forms, which automatically integrate in the UMC application. Thus, each user can have a private form for his personal use, which is protected by a personal form password. Before you start a search, you should clear the form by clicking on the Clear-Button. When you click the List- Button most fields like customer are included in the search. The search will be case insensitiv and many entries are extended by the SQL-Wildcard sign '%' automatically. Thus, in many cases, you will only need to enter the very first characters. Non-indexed fields like the phone number are also preceded by the wildcard sign, which allows to search for substrings. When the search returns just one record, the data is autoloaded into the form. Otherwise you can load any record into the form by using the 'Jump to Button'.

The Output Window

Any kind of output information is displayed in the Output Window. For example, each User can be posted an individual Welcome Message, which is automatically displayed, when he logs in. Furthermore, each update or insert will be confirmed through the Output Window .

UMC Right Button

The UMC Right Button provides elegant short cuts in the UMC application. For example, you can return to the login Page or connect to the VNC Server just by clicking the UMC right Button.

UMC Hotkeys

UMC Users can use hotkeys rather than clicking on the corresponding buttons, by pressing:
<alt + first letter of button label >

UMC Dynamic Lookup Lists

The UMC Application provides both, static and dynamic lookup lists. Dynamic lookup lists are created on the fly by looking up the current entries of the corresponding tables, while static lookup lists are hardcoded in the HTML Page.

UMC Printouts

Each Form can be displayed in a printable letter format. The design for the printouts can be different for each form. Thus, you can have high quality printouts without using extra application software.

UMC Form Layouts

The UMC can provide multiple Layouts. By default there is a standard layout for basic Browsers and an extended Layout for Browsers, that fully comply with the HTML 4 Standard. Furthermore, the UMC can use multiple Form Layouts to support forms in different languages.

UMC Virtual Notepad

Each Form incorporates a virtual Notepad, which allows you, to easily note down each taken action. The virtual Notepad will automatically store the timestamp and Userid for the action. Thus, it is very easy to follow up what has been yet done on a certain item. Moreover, it will be of great help, if you search for a solution for a similar or already analyzed problem. Besides, there is a Form for Troubleshooting, in order to define standard actions for well-known errors.

Probes

Probes will process any kind of alertfile in order to deliver all sorts of alarms to the Umbrella Management Center automatically. Probes can be configured to filter, categorize and deduplicate alarms. There are 4 Out-of- the-Box Probes and 2 Watchdogs available:

Ping Probe
Generic Probe
Syslog Probe
Oracle Probe
Service Checker
Threshold Watchdog

Alarm Correlation

There are 3 ways to correlate alarms. You can easily correlate alarms by their source, which is usually the hostname or the time range they were created. A more sophisticated way to correlate alarms, however, is to take even the network into account, which is done by the system manager and cannot be automated for the time being.

The UMC provides an Alarm Correlation Button, which will correlate alarms which were created within the correlation windowsize, grouping the alarms by customer and hostname.