General best practices and guidance for configuration

• PATROL Agent rules cannot be merged in Central Monitoring Administration.
• Non-policy managed Knowledge Modules must be included in the preloaded Knowledge Module list manually.
• Use caution with policies. They can have global impact.
• Ensure that the load preloaded KMs agent configuration rule is set to true on all agents before adding the agents to Infrastructure Management. This is a default setting in version 9.6 agents and must be ensured for all agents.
• The PATROL Agent version 9.5 default setting for loadOnlyPreloadedKMs is “Yes”.  If you load a Knowledge Module that is not in the preloaded list on a BMC PATROL console, the console shows that the Knowledge Module is disabled.
• Define configuration for event integration and monitoring for the availability parameters first.
• Always establish and follow standards for policies including policy names, precedence, and so on.
• Do not propagate agent disconnected events to Integration for BMC Remedy Service Desk (and thereby generate tickets in BMC IT Service Management) in a development or test environment and/or from a server related to a staging Integration Service node. When the agents are disconnected from these environments and are connecting to a production Integration Service, the disconnected events are expected and normal.
• Do not enable policies for production agents until tested. The default setting is disabled.
• Leverage the ability to test policies in development and QA environments then apply to the production environment from the same Central Monitoring Administration instance in environments that have a single, shared Central Monitoring Administration instance. Leverage selection criteria in monitoring policies for this. For details, see Staging Integration Service host deployment and policy management for development, test, and production best practices .
• Allow large domain collection like VMware vSphere discovery to complete before reviewing it in the operator console. The hierarchy has to be built and the views may look odd until it is complete.
• The PATROL Agents buffer data and events when they cannot connect to the Integration Service node. The default setting is set to buffer for 30 minutes. Do not increase this setting especially in large environments, as larger volumes of buffered data being processed after a re-connection can potentially cause performance issues.

• 9.6 PATROL Agents support the use of customer overlay configuration files in the lib directory to manage alterations to the config.default file settings. The customer overlay configuration files are named <name>.current where <name> is whichever file name that you want. Any .current configuration files that exist in the lib directory are read after the config.default file and before the pconfig database is read.
  Note: Overlay configuration files do not work with /ConfigData rules. These rules should be sent by Central Monitoring Administration only.

• Be very careful while deleting and/or disabling policies. When you delete or disable a policy, all corresponding monitored instances on all related managed nodes are immediately marked for deletion. If you have a policy that needs significant editing, and you want to delete that policy, it is best to do the following:

  1. Create a new policy with a lower precedence number that overrides the older policy.

  2. After you have tested, validated, and enabled the new policy in production, delete the old policy.

• Use the most descriptive names available when defining instances to a monitor. For example, leverage the “Display name” for monitoring Windows Services instead of the “Service name”. This makes it easier to identify the service in the Infrastructure Management UI.

• Use the default setting of the KPI mode for the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server. Do not disable the KPI mode causing all trended data in the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server to have baselines calculated for them. This is also recommended for earlier Infrastructure Management versions. This is not as significant an issue with the latest Infrastructure Management if the new Infrastructure Management capability to query BMC PATROL data from the Infrastructure Management UI is leveraged. However, the recommendation must still be observed.

• The Agent Query user function in Central Monitoring Administration has two scenarios regarding security. These scenarios also involve different communication channels to the agents and are described as follows:

  • Seamless access - If the user has the "Allow trusted connections to PATROL Agents" permission, they can access agents through the agent query function without manually logging into the agent. In this scenario, the communication path to the agents from Central Monitoring Administration is through the Agent Controller on the Infrastructure Management Server to the Integration Service node and on to the agent. The communication leverages the existing connection to the agent for policy management.

  • Agent logon required access – If the user does not have the "Allow trusted connections to PATROL Agents" permission, the Agent Query function requires the user to log into the agent to execute commands.  The login screen for this is presented by clicking on the Disconnect button in the Agent Query screen when an authentication error is displayed while executing a command.

Related topics

Setting up agents and policies for infrastructure monitoring

Monitoring configuration best practice reference