Defining a staging policy

Use staging policies to set the phone home for the PATROL Agents. The staging policy is applicable only when the PATROL Agent configuration request comes through a staging Integration Service.

Ensure that you have the required permissions to define and manage staging policies. For details, see Configuring Infrastructure Management to monitor and manage your infrastructure systems.

Related topics

Policy management

Administering Integration Service clusters

Managing policies

Managing Infrastructure Management devices from the TrueSight console

Policy precedence best practices

Other policy types

Defining a monitoring policy

Defining a blackout policy

Best Practice

Use a staging policy to assign a data collection Integration Service, that is, an Integration Service that processes performance data and events, to PATROL Agents. Avoid controlling the Integration Service configuration for Agents through the Agent configuration in a monitoring policy.
To control the connection of a PATROL Agent to the correct staging Integration Service when you have multiple staging Integration Services and multiple Infrastructure Management servers, use tags or IP address information in the Agent Selection Criteria properties.
Specify a unique precedence number per policy.

Note

PATROL Agents do not forward data or events to the Infrastructure Management server when connected to a staging Integration Service.
PATROL Agents do not "activate" any monitoring or blackout policies when they connect to a staging Integration Service and the staging policy is applied. Agents need to connect to a data collection Integration Service and receive a monitoring policy for data to flow from Agents to Infrastructure Management server.

Staging policy properties

General

Property	Description
Name	Name for the policy. The policy names must be unique. In an environment with tenants, the policy names must be unique for a single tenant. It is a mandatory field. For more information, see Policy naming guidelines.
Description	(Optional) A brief description about the policy
Associated User Group	Name of the user group that is associated with the PATROL Agents as defined in the Authorization Profile or in the PATROL Agent ACLs. The policy is applicable to these PATROL Agents. Note: The list of user groups that is displayed includes the user groups that the logged on user belongs to. For monitoring and blackout policies, this property determines the monitoring solutions and configuration options that you have. For more information about granting or restricting access, see Specifying objects in an authorization profile . This property can be viewed in READ-ONLY mode by other users of the user group. Only the owner of the policy can modify this property.
Share with User Group	Specify whether this policy is to be shared with the users across the associated user group or not. This property can be viewed in READ-ONLY mode by other users of the associated user group. Only the owner of the policy can modify this property.
Precedence	Priority of the policy. Based on the precedence number that you configure, the configuration is applied to the PATROL Agents and the Infrastructure Management servers. The precedence number ranges from 0 to 999. A lower number indicates a higher precedence. The default value is 900. The configuration from a policy with a higher precedence overrides the configuration from a policy with a lower precedence. If two policies have the same precedence number, then the configuration from the latest created policy takes priority.
Enable Policy	Indicates whether the policy is enabled or disabled. By default, the policy is enabled. If you disable a policy when you create it, the policy configurations are not applied to the PATROL Agents and the Infrastructure Management Servers. If you disable any existing policy, the policy configurations are removed from the PATROL Agents and the Infrastructure Management servers, where the policy was applied.

Agent Selection Criteria

Property	Description
Agent Host Name	Host name of the computer on which the PATROL Agent is installed. Note: The value for the matches property must be a strict regular expression. Some examples of regular expressions that can be used: virtual_machine -- To select Agents that match the exact string "virtual_machine" .?virtual_machine. -- To select Agents that match the sub-string "virtual_machine" *^((?!clm-pun).)$ -- To select Agents that do not match the sub-string "clm-pun**"
Agent Port	Port number through which the PATROL Agent listens for incoming connections from the PATROL console. Use port numbers from 1025 to 65535.
Agent Version	Version of the PATROL Agent.
Agent Operating System	Operating system of the computer on which the PATROL Agent is installed.
Agent IP Address	IP address of the computer on which the PATROL Agent is installed. If you select the Agent IP Address in the range condition, only IPv4 range is supported.
Agent Tag	Tag applied on the PATROL Agent.
Integration Service	PATROL Agents connected to the selected Integration Service.
Infrastructure Management Server	PATROL Agents connected to the selected Infrastructure Management Server.
Monitoring Solution Name¹	PATROL Agents on which the selected monitoring solution is installed.
Monitoring Solution Version¹	PATROL Agents on which monitoring solutions of the specified version are installed.
Tenant Name	Name of the tenant to which the PATROL Agent are associated via the Integration Service.

¹ - The Monitoring Solution Name property is only applicable to PATROL Agent version 10.0 and later.

You can set multiple conditions and also group the conditions to identify the agents.

Note: The values that you enter for the properties are not case-sensitive.

Agent Configuration

Property

Description

Tag

(Optional) The tag that you want to assign to the PATROL Agent. The format of each tag is <tagName>:<tagDescription>. You can provide multiple tags, separated by commas. If the tag description contains spaces, enclose the description within double quotes.
For example: tag1:"Brief Description",tag2:Description

Integration Service

Select an Integration Service or an Integration Service cluster that you want to set as the PATROL Agent phone home. The supported values are as follows:

Single Integration Service
Integration Service Cluster

Note: The list of Integration Services includes only the data collection or non-staging Integration Services.

To create a staging policy

Log on to the TrueSight console.
In the navigation pane, expand Configuration and select Infrastructure Policies.
In the Infrastructure Policies page, click the Staging tab and click Create Policy.
In the Create Policy page, specify the staging policy properties:
1. Specify the basic properties. For more information, see General properties.
2. Configure the conditions to select the PATROL Agents on which you want to apply the policy. For more information, see Agent Selection Criteria properties.
  Steps to select Agents
  1. Select a property.
  2. Select an operator to create the condition. The available operators depend on the property that you select.
  3. Specify a value for the selected property.
  4. (Optional) To add more than one condition, click the button, and perform the earlier steps.
  5. (Optional) To group the conditions, use the following parentheses and Boolean operators from their corresponding lists:
    (
    ((
    (((
    )
    ))
    )))
    AND
    OR
  6. (Optional) To remove any existing condition, click the button.
  To view the list of PATROL Agents that are selected based on the specified criteria, click Preview.
3. Configure the PATROL Agents that you want to apply the policy on. For more information, see Agent Configuration properties.
Click Save.

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