Basics Collins in 60 seconds The Collins web UI is very simple, only providing a small subset of the functionality available via the API. This document should be considered a user guide to Collins where a user is someone who provisions machines or occasionally needs to look up asset data. The information here will not be particularly useful for Collins API developers or Collins administrators. This is as close to a walkthrough or tour as you will get. During the tour we'll walk through the process of provisioning a server, as well as highlight some of the additional functionality available in the web UI. You can mostly just follow the screenshots unless you want additional information. Heads up! Most actions outside of logging in, searching, or viewing an asset will result in some action being taken. For instance, putting an asset in maintenance may generate a JIRA ticket for the datacenter team. Power cycling a host will cause it to be rebooted, and log the fact that you rebooted it. Be responsible.

Login Getting into Collins At Tumblr you will use your LDAP credentials to authenticate to Collins. Your LDAP groups will determine the level of functionality you have available to you in collins. If you are not at Tumblr your administrator may be using flat-files or some other authentication mechanism. See your Collins administrator for login details. When you first go to collins you will be presented with an interface like the following. Enter in your account credentials and hit the enter key or click sign-in to authenticate. Heads up! Authentication is required to do anything in collins. The only functionality available anonymously in Collins is the login page, the help page, and the timestamp API endpoint.

Search Find the stuff you're looking for, fast Once you have authenticated to collins you should be presented with a search UI. The elements on the left in this interface are asset attributes (e.g. status, tag, etc) while the elements on the right are tags (e.g. hostname, pool, etc). The search fields on the left are fixed, the search fields on the right can be configured by your collins administrator. In this interface you can search for assets that match the criteria you specify. Since we're looking for a server to provision, we're going to look for unallocated server nodes. Due to the current collins configuration, you can only provision Unallocated hosts. A sample search results page is below. The search results page is color coded to reflect the status of the asset. Incomplete and new assets are yellow, provisioning and provisioned assets are blue, cancelled and decommissioned assets are green, and maintenance assets are red. People usually ask why allocated/unallocated assets aren't green. Since allocated and unallocated are the default states, using green resulted in an all green search results page. No color was just better.

Asset details Dig into your equipment and configurations Once you click through from the search results to an asset, you are presented with the details page. The asset details page provides all known asset information to you in an easy to digest format. Asset Overview The overview tab provides general details about the asset such as the hostname, status, any user supplied notes as well as a hardware overview which includes information such as amount of RAM or number of CPU's. The formatting of each tag is declared in the application configuration as a decorator. Decorators are available for links, images, and many other formats. IPMI Info The IPMI info tab provides remote console access to the asset if it's enabled. Log Data The logs tab shows all historical log information for that asset. Hardware Details The hardware details tab shows you detailed information about the hardware configuration of the asset. LLDP Info The LLDP tab shows you known LLDP data for each interface reporting it. Asset Trends and Graphs The graphs view (if configured) display data about the asset from your trending or graphing system, such as munin, cacti, ganglia or OpenTSDB. Previous Next