StateScene

Network diagrams are an essential tool to help build and maintain any network. Lithium Console's StateScene feature, now brings your existing network diagrams to life, displaying the current state of your network overlayed on your network diagrams. StateScenes are not restricted to just network device maps, you can, for instance have a Scene of a geographical map of all of your sites.

To open a new StateScene window click File -> New -> StateScene (Command +Shift + S), or you can open an existing scene by clicking on File -> open (Command + O) and locating the Scene file.

There are two main concepts of a Scene. The background image, and Overlays .

To add/change the  the background image click Image -> Set Background Image. The window resizes to accomodate the current background image. The background image can be of any format recognised by the operating system.

Overlays

An Overlay is a user-defined placeholder, that you can bind any entity to. Overlay's can be added to a scene by either double clicking on the location, or by clicking and dragging a rectangle around the required region of the diagram. Overlays can be moved and resized at any time. There is no limit to the number of overlays that can be added to a scene.

To bind an entity to an overlay, simply drag the required entity from an open browser window, and drop it into the required Overlay. There can only ever be one entity bound to an overlay at a time. To remove the bound entity, control click on the Overlay and select "Remove Entity".

 To remove an overlay from a Scene, right-click on the Overlay and select "Remove Overlay".

The right mouse-click context menu of an Overlay contains the following:

Option	Description
Remove Overlay	Removes the Overlay from the StateScene
Remove Entity	Unbinds the entity from this Overlay. If there is no entity bound to the Overlay, this option is disabled.
Browse To	Opens up the entity in a new browser window. If there is no entity bound to the Overlay, this option is disabled.
Fault History	Opens up the fault history for the current Entity. If there is no entity bound to the Overlay, this option is disabled.
Metric History	Displays the history of this metric. This option is only available for Entities of type "Metric".
Graph Entity	Displays a graph for this entity. This is only available for graphable entities.

Adding/Changing Background Image

To Add/Change the background image of your StateScene,  simply select "Scene" from the menu bar and click "Set Background Image". The image format can be of any format the operating system recognises (eg. bmp, jpg, png, gif). When you set a new background image, the StateScene window resizes to the size of your image.

Adding/Removing Overlays

There are two ways in which you can add an Overlay to your Scene. To place an overlay around a region of the background image, click where you would like the region to start and drag the mouse to the desired size. To place an autosizing Overlay, double click on the location you want the overlay. This will place a new minimised overlay at that location.

 

You can resize and move overlays around the Scene at anytime. To move an Overlay, simply select it, and drag it to the required location. To resize an Overlay, click the bottom right-hand corner, and drag the overlay to the desired size.

 

 To remove an overlay from your Scene, ctrl click on the overlay and select "Remove Overlay".

Binding/Removing Entities to an Overlay

To bind an Entity to an overlay, you first need to have your Scene open, and a Browser window open. Once you have located the correct Entity in the browser, simply drag it onto your StateScene window and onto the correct Overlay. Only one Entity can be bound to an Overlay at a time. As you drag an entity onto the the Scene, all empty Overlays are highlighted light blue.

 

Once an entity has been bound to an overlay, the status dot of the overlay (Top left-hand corner of the overlay) will display the current status of the entity. If the entity is in a non-normal state (ie At-Risk, Impaired, or Critical), the details of the fault will be shown in the overlay, if the overlay is an autosize Overlay, the Overlay will resize itself to show the details of the fault.

To unbind an Entity from an Overlay, Right mouse click on the overlay and select "Remove Entity". This will remove the Entity and the status will now be grey.

Investigating an Entity

When an incident is raised for an entity that is bound to an overlay, information about that incident is displayed in the overlay. There are four options from the right-mouse click context menu to help you  investigate incidents and Entities. 

 

Browse To...

Clicking the Browse To... option will open a new browser window, and automatically locate the entity this overlay is bound to.

Fault History

The Fault History option, takes you back to the main Lithium Console window and displays case and incident history of the entity

Metric History

When the entity that is bound to an overlay is of a Metric type, you can produce a history of all the recorded values.

Graph Metric

If the bound entity is a graphable entity (eg metrics) then you may wish to graph the entity using this option.