End-user experience monitoring platform alarms

BMC Real End User Monitoring components share a platform layer that provides common features, such as the alarm framework. The alarm framework simplifies Customer Support activity by passing low-level system information and by performing corrective actions for simple problems. The alarm framework is invoked every 60 seconds.

The following example shows an alarm received in email.

Email alert sample

 

Date: 2013-02-06 19:06:02 -0800

Source: Company Analyzer

Severity: attention

Name: storage.performance.io \[raised\]

Description: Performance of drives sdb does not match data processing volume.

The following topics describe the characteristics of a platform alarm and how you view or receive the alarms.

For a detailed list, see the Platform-alarm-reference.

Alarm characteristics

You use the alarm-command to display a list of active alarms for a component and to set platform alarm properties.

The following table describes the characteristics of platform alarms.  (The underlined characteristics are displayed when you run the alarm command.)

Platform alarm characteristics

Characteristic

Description

Name

Alarm name

Description

Short description of the alarm

Severity

Impact of the alarm

  • Info - This informational alarm can be ignored if there are no follow up alarms with a higher severity.
  • Attention - Notification of an important system event, such as the system restarting. No action is required.
  • Error - The system encountered a broken function that does not impair the main functionality of the product.
  • Critical - The system is in a condition where a main function is compromised. Take immediate action, possibly with assistance from Customer Support.

Mask

Alarm name, alarm group, or alarm subgroup used to temporarily disable evaluation of the listed alarms when the alarm is raised

Masking can prevent the system from raising multiple alarms for the same problem.

Property

Criteria that specify the threshold for raising an alarm (Use alarm -p to show alarm properties.)

For the platform alarms with an associated property, see the Long description in the Platform-alarm-reference.

Automatic corrective action

Associations to corrective actions that are triggered when specific conditions are reached

All unmasked alarms are evaluated based on the embedded conditions and system health status.

Alarm output mechanisms

When an alarm is raised by the system, it is sent to the internal syslog file. You can receive the alarms in a system log, by email alerts, or by SNMP trap alerts.

  • System log - You can send a copy of the syslog entries to a remote syslog server. The syslog will contain a line entry from “alarmMonitor.”
  • System alert email - You can use the same mechanism for emailing alerts to route platform alarms.
  • System alert SNMP trap - You can use SNMP traps to send alarms to an SNMP manager.

Consult the following topics for information about how to configure these mechanisms to receive alarms:

Contributed by BaoPhac Do.

 

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