Use this topic to familiarize yourself with the elements of the Marvel Enterprise Portal window.

The Marvel Enterprise Portal can be started as a desktop application or through your browser by entering the URL for the Marvel Enterprise Portal Server. There are a few differences in operation between the two clients..

The Marvel Enterprise Portal gives you a single point of control for managing the resources your applications rely on, including a range of operating systems, servers, databases, platforms, and web components. For example, a typical IT network might have a web server on Windows, an application server and database on UNIX, and a transaction processor on CICS® on the mainframe. The Marvel Enterprise Portal brings all these views together in a single window so that you can see when any aspect of your network is not working as expected. Your IBM Marvel Monitoring products use the portal interface with these major features, and you can find demos for many of them on developer works in the Media Gallery.

Every agent is designed to monitor specific attributes of an operating system or other type of software. With these attributes, come definitions for use with the Marvel Enterprise Portal functions.

This list provides some general debugging information.

Use the tools in the Navigator view toolbar to update the display when managed systems have come online or gone offline, to open another Navigator view, to edit custom Navigator views, and to collapse the view.

More indicators in the Navigator keep the tree compact. Click the indicator to open that branch of the tree. You can specify how many items to expand at one time.

The Navigator shows all the managed systems that run on an operating system and this list can get very long. Use the Find tool to locate Navigator items based on properties such as IP address or associated situations.

The initial Marvel Enterprise Portal workplace has a Navigator Physical view and a Logical view and any other views that were predefined for your product. You can switch between Navigator views to see the items and workspaces of another Navigator.

Use the Managed System Status workspace to clear offline managed systems from the Navigator view.

Have multiple workspaces open on your desktop at the same time by opening multiple Marvel Enterprise Portal windows.

Use the tabbed pages capability of your browser to open workspaces, linked workspaces, and Navigator views in new tabs.

You can refresh the data that is displayed in the workspace on demand or at a set interval.

If the workspace is set to refresh automatically at timed intervals or it includes event status views, you can suspend refreshes to keep the data from changing while you investigate a problem.

Use these steps to link to a workspace that has been targeted from the current Navigator item or view.

You can have the Marvel Enterprise Portal log data samplings into history files or a database for display in a table or chart. These historical data enabled views have a tool for setting a range of previous data samples to be reported.

Move a view to a different position in the workspace to take best advantage of the available space.

Change how a table view is sorted temporarily to focus on specific column details or in a more permanent way if it should always appear sorted in this manner. You can also reposition columns for a more logical organization or to emphasize columns of interest.

Zoom in on part of a bar chart, plot chart, or area chart to see a subset of the data in greater detail.

Save some or all of the data that was retrieved by the query for a view in a text (.txt) file or comma separated value (.csv) file for further manipulation in another software application.

Use the find function to locate text in the selected notepad view or browser view.

Use the find function to locate a text or numeric value in the selected table view, message log, or event console view.

You can print the workspace or an individual view and display a preview beforehand.

The products that run in the Marvel Monitoring environment come with their own set of situations. These predefined situations serve as models for defining custom situations for your environment.

When an event is opened for a true situation, you can acknowledge it. This notifies other users that you have taken ownership of the problem related to the event and are working on it. The acknowledgement window records the time of the acknowledgement and the ID of the user.

When the condition of a situation is met, the situation becomes true and an event indicator is displayed over the system name and all related items in the Navigator. For pure events, you can turn off the indicator by closing the event. The situation continues to run but the indicator disappears until another pure event takes place.

Typically, workspaces you create are saved with your user ID and no other users can see them. You can turn on administration mode so that all workspaces you edit and save while in this mode are shared with all users who log on to the same Marvel Enterprise Portal Server.

You can create a new workspace from any existing workspace. The new workspace is associated with the same Navigator item as the original workspace. You cannot save a new workspace if your user ID does not have Workspace Author Mode permission.

You must save a workspace to maintain the changes you make to the workspace properties; otherwise, the changes you have made are lost.

Use the Properties editor to change the general characteristics of a workspace and to edit the style and content of any of its views. You can delete or restore the original version of an edited workspace through the File menu.

You can rename a workspace to better suit your environment.

You can delete a workspace of your creation and restore the original version of a predefined workspace or one created by the administrator.