Getting Started with Rackspace Intelligence for the Cloud

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This guide is for Rackspace Intelligence on a standard cloud account. If you have a dedicated account, see Getting started with Rackspace Intelligence for dedicated accounts.

Rackspace Intelligence provides a dashboard that shows actionable insights into the health of your infrastructure. You can use these insights to improve your system's performance and availability.

You can use Rackspace Intelligence to help you understand the following kinds of entities:

• Rackspace cloud servers
• Rackspace cloud databases
• Rackspace or another service's hosted entities

Rackspace Intelligence can gather and act on only the information that is available to it. For example, if you define a website hosted outside of Rackspace as an entity, then you might be able to place a check on its ping time, but you probably can't check the space available in its file system.

Access Rackspace Intelligence

Use the following steps to access Rackspace Intelligence:

1. Log in to the Cloud Control Panel.

   If your account requires it, you might need to perform additional steps to set up Multifactor authentication from the Cloud Control Panel.

2. In the top navigation bar, click Select a Product > Rackspace Intelligence.

Learn Rackspace Intelligence vocabulary

To fully use the features that Rackspace Intelligence offers, you should familiarize yourself with the basic concepts about entity monitoring and metrics. For more information, see Learning the Rackspace Intelligence vocabulary.

Explore the Rackspace Intelligence dashboard

The dashboard groups actions you can perform in the user interface into four sections: Monitor, Alert, Suppress, and Visualize. Within each section, you can view details about the action. For more information, see Understanding the Rackspace Intelligence user interface.

Begin Working with a New Entity

As soon as it becomes aware of an entity, Rackspace Intelligence can discover and display basic status information about it. Rackspace Intelligence can give you deeper insights about an entity if you configure that entity to provide more information. For suggestions on steps that you can take to maximize the information available to Rackspace Intelligence, see Preparing to use Rackspace Intelligence.

Manage how Rackspace Intelligence Monitors Your infrastructure

You can use the Monitor, Alert, Suppress, and Visualize sections of the interface to identify the infrastructure that you want to monitor and examine events in your configuration.

Use the Rackspace Intelligence Dashboard

You can use the Rackspace Intelligence dashboard to examine and manage how Rackspace Intelligence interacts with your infrastructure. The Rackspace Intelligence dashboard provides information about the following items:

• Entities monitored by Rackspace Intelligence
• Monitoring agents
• Open alerts
• Current suppressed notifications
• Notifications that were suppressed in the past

You can also use the Rackspace Intelligence dashboard to generate graphs to visualize infrastructure status.

Monitor Entities

The list of entities identifies all entities known to Rackspace Intelligence. While displaying the list
of known entities, you can perform management functions such as defining new entities.

The Monitor section of the interface also displays information about Notifications and Notification Plans.

Monitor Open Alerts

The list of open alerts identifies all entities currently in a status for which you have asked Rackspace Intelligence to trigger alarms.

Depending on the notification plans you have defined, the system might already have sent appropriate communications and taken actions in response to these alerts. Examine the list directly to investigate infrastructure status in context whether or not the system automatically notified you about status changes.

Change How Rackspace Intelligence Communicates its Findings

You can manage your status change notification process and select which notifications the system suppresses.

You can also examine a log to investigate the changes that occurred while the system suppressed notifications.

Report Infrastructure Status

When Rackspace Intelligence detects a status change, it can report its findings by sending an email or a text message. Rackspace Intelligence can also respond to a status change by executing a policy defined by a webhook.

To customize how Rackspace Intelligence responds when it detects a status change, perform the following actions:

• Define notifications.
  Ensure that you also provide contact details as part of this process.
• Define notification plans.
  Ensure that you also define the notifications that you want to perform and under which circumstances.

Suppress Reporting of Infrastructure Status

Rackspace Intelligence enables you to suppress notifications when notifications are temporarily inappropriate, such as during scheduled maintenance activity.

Examine the Suppression Log

To investigate the alerts that the system muted but that ordinarily would have prompted notifications, you can examine the suppression log.

View what Rackspace Intelligence Sees

The information in this section shows you how to view the information that Rackspace Intelligence sees.

Visualize Infrastructure Status

Rackspace Intelligence can report its findings visually through the following types of graphs:

• Basic graphs: These predefined graphs enable you to observe changes in the status of an entity that occurred within a specific time range.

• Custom graphs: These graphs enable you to compare multiple entities and multiple metrics.

Create Checks and Alarms for Your Entities

The information in this section shows you how to create checks and alarms for your entities.

Create and Manage Checks and Alarms

Rackspace Intelligence provides a wizard that enables you to create monitoring checks that collect metric data for your infrastructure. You can set up alarms for your checks to receive notifications when certain metric data meet criteria. You can also perform management functions, such as editing your checks and editing your alarms.