===== Configuration items =====

  * Following components are the key elements of the configuration.
  * It is important to understand what they are, how to use them and configure them.


==== Group/Company ====
  * A company is an organizational unit in which monitored systems will be organized
  * It is also a silo that can be used to isolate a group of systems and configure their visibility across Redpeaks users

==== System ====
  * A system represents an SAP system as per SAP terminology.
  * Every system must be attached to one company
  * It is identified by a system ID (SID), a 3 letter string
  * Within a system, Redpeaks might use several connection means to access to the target data
  * These connections means are identified as **connectors**
  * Administrators can classify a system by adding one or more Tags on it (see "Tags" section here below)   

==== Connector ====
  * A connector defines an access mean to a SAP system
  * It is attached to one system
  * Depending on the type of system, connectors can be created individually or sometimes being created automatically based on system settings
  * For each type of connector (ABAP, HANA, BusinessObjects, ...) will correspond a type of **monitor**

==== SAP user ====
  * In most cases, connectors will need to use user credentials to connect to the systems.
  * These credentials will be stored in a **SAP user profile** and associated with one or several connectors.
  * User profiles are associated to one company

==== Profile ====
  * A profile is a configuration template that can be used across several systems.
  * It provides a way to centralize the monitoring configuration of several systems and to facilitate configuration changes.
  * It is composed by a group of **monitors** with a specific customization
  * Profiles are built by selecting monitors in the **monitoring library**, and then by configuring each monitor for a given purpose
  * All systems associated to the same profile will be monitored the same way.
  * The use of profiles is the only manner to associate a monitor to a system, **it is the central component of the configuration**.
  * Profiles will be associated to connectors (and not to systems), therefore, profiles will usually contain monitors for a given type of connector.

==== Monitor ====
  * A monitor represents the configuration of the monitoring of a specific module or component within a system (ie: Users, CPU, Response times, etc...)
  * One monitor can usually only be assigned to one type of connector (ie ABAP buffers monitor can only work with ABAP connector)
  * Via a set of filters, thresholds, severity, periods and other specific parameters, you can configure in details how a monitor will perform and what kind of data it will produce (alarms, metrics, etc...)
  * You can for instance configure a large scope monitor picking any event on any instance as well as reacting to a specific event, for a specific user on a specific instance.
  * **The actual monitoring is defined in the monitors**
  * The same monitor can be configured differently across different profiles

==== Monitoring library ====
  * The monitoring library is a set of profiles containing monitors with a predefined configuration
  * It is meant to facilitate the configuration process by providing default templates.
  * These templates have been configured based on recommended configurations.

==== SLD profile ====
  * An SLD profile defines the connection parameters to the System Landscape Directory of a company
  * Once a profile is configured, it can be used to discover the registered systems from the SLD and create automatically all necessary systems an connectors.

==== Tags ====
  * Redpeaks allows Administrators to classify SAP Systems : System Tags.
  * A Tag is simply a "label" that can be assigned to Systems.
  * Administrators can put one or more Tags on a given System.
  * To acess Tags management (creation, update, deletion) : Configure -> Tags
  * Tags can also be used as discrimition criteria when assigning Authorization Profiles (see Authorization Profiles for more details)    

==== Plugins ====
  * Plugins are used to integrate Redpeaks with another application.
  * It contains the connection parameters used to connect with an **external API**.
  * As Redpeaks produces alarms, metrics and reports, they can be transferred to external solutions using plugins.

==== Alarm rules ====
  * Alarm rules allows to filter the alerts sent by Redpeaks
  * The alerts can be sent via plugins. The alarm rules help to control and dispatch generated alerts to the plugins
  * This is typicaly used to differentiate how alerts are beeing managed, based on the systems, severities, time of day, etc...