Multi Site Management: Building site relationships in v5

Version 4 was a complete rewrite of the Boring Client and in that version we introduced multi-site management. This feature allowed you to open tabs and connect to different Milestone XProtect management servers whether federated, interconnected or not, and manage them all from the same client. Each open tab would then populate its live monitoring tile into a global dashboard.  The drawback was that you had to manually open the tabs each time you opened the Boring client.

In version 5, you can create a hierarchy where a parent site will have pre-configured connections to remote managed sites. This way, if you have access to log into the parent site, you will immediately be able to see the health status of each of your managed sites right in the global dashboard. This saves you the time of opening up all those tabs each time you log in.  We also used this opportunity to be able to push configurations down to the managed sites from the parent. 

The Parent Site

Whether you have one site or many, you will always need to configure a parent site.  This is what allows our Boring background services to connect to Milestone XProtect and retrieve information about the VMS.  Here you will also set up email server configuration needed for the live monitoring service and scheduled reports.

Configuring a parent site

• Install the Boring Services on the XProtect Management Server that you would like to make a parent
• Open Boring Toolbox
• Connect to the XProtect Management Server
• On the left navigation, Click Managed Sites
• Click Add Parent Site
• In the Managed Site Configuration dialog
  • Site Name
    • This is a nickname you would like to give the site and does not have to match the host name of the computer
  • License channel allocation
    • At this time we do not have the ability to set licenses automatically so you need to allocate parts of your overall license to each of your sites
    • All background services abide by this license allocation so be sure you have allocated enough licenses per site
  • Connection Details
    • Here you will enter the information of the management server you would like to make a parent
    • This should be the server you are currently connected to
  • Click, Test Connection, to make sure you can connect to the Boring Services installed on the management server
    • If you can not connect, check to make sure the Boring services are installed and running on the management server 

Notification and live monitoring settings

The next part of the configuration sets how email notifications will be sent for the live monitoring server and scheduled reports.  We have detailed the process in the What is Live Monitoring KB.

Once you completed the set up of the parent Boring Toolbox is ready to create scheduled reports and send email notifications from the Live Monitoring Service.

The Managed Site

A managed site is another XProtect Management Server that you would like to see in the Global Dashboard when you log into the parent and which you would like to manage in Boring Toolbox.

Setting up a managed site is very similar to setting up a parent.  The only difference is that you will click the Add Managed Site button, which is now located underneath the parent site information you just added.

Once the managed site is added a couple things happen.

• The parent creates a connection to the managed site
• Parent pushes notification and live monitoring settings to the managed site
• Scheduled reports and live monitoring are ready for use on the managed site
• The managed site is added to the global dashboard when you connect to the parent site

The Global Dashboard

In the Global Dashboard you will be able to see:

• Parent site (left)
• All managed sites (right)
• Any site you have open in a tab

Starting Live Monitoring on a managed site

When logging in a parent site will automatically begin showing the live monitoring information.  Managed sites will have a grey header and no live monitoring information.  In order to see live monitoring information for the managed site you will need to press the blue live monitoring button.

Opening a managed site in a new tab

The top right of each tile will have an icon with a box and arrow.  When you click this icon, a new tab will open with the IP address of the managed site in the server address field.  Boring Toolbox will ask you to log into the managed site at this point.

The Boring Toolbox does not log in to the managed site automatically with the service account used in the initial set up of the managed site. This is done to protect the user access rights of the managed site as the user logged into Boring Toolbox may not have rights to the managed site and we want to make sure it stays that way.

Some Rules

• A managed site can not be a parent