Defining monitor policies

 Monitor policies are a set of rules that enable administrators to deploy configurations to PATROL Agents by using monitoring solutions. Monitor policies provide instructions and information about what information to monitor. For an overview of monitor policies, see Overview of monitor policies.

As an administrator, you can perform the following operations on monitor policies:

• Create, edit, and delete
• Copy
• Enable and disable
• View audit trail details

View all monitor policies on the Configuration > Monitor Policies page. For more information, see Overview of monitor policies.

To create a monitor policy

On the Configuration > Monitor Policies page, click Create, and follow these steps:

1. On the Create Monitoring Policy page, add a unique name and description for the monitor policy. 
   BMC recommends that you organize policies according to the precedence numbers when creating and editing policies. You can also include policy-specific information in the policy names.
   Examples:
   • Option 1: To enable easy sorting of policies, include the precedence number of a policy as a prefix in the policy naming as per the following format: <precedence number>_<policyname>.
     Examples:
     • 099_Basic_Event_Propagation_ALL_AGENTS
     • 599_Standard_Windows_OS_Monitoring
   • Option 2: To enable easy searching of policies, include policy-specific information in the policy naming. For example, you can easily find all Windows policies if the policies are named as follows:
     • 899_Windows2012_Service_Monitoring
     • 799_Windows2012_Standard_Monitoring
     • 699_Windows2008_SQLSrv_Monitoring
2. Add the associated user group for the policy. 
   An associated user group is the user group that the logged-on user belongs to. If the user belongs to multiple user groups, select the appropriate user group for the policy.
3. If you want to share the policy with the user group that you selected, select the  Share with User Group  checkbox.

4. Add a unique precedence number to the policy.
   You can add a custom value in this field, or use the arrows to increase or decrease the value.

5. If you want to enable the policy immediately, select  Enable Policy . You can enable it later from the Monitor Policies page.

6. Add the PATROL Agent selection criteria based on which the policy must be applied to the Agents.
   Refer to the following image:
   
   Perform the following actions to add the selection criteria:

   1. Add one of the following boolean operators:

      • Agent Host Name: Host name of the computer on which the PATROL Agent is installed.
        Important: The value for the matches property must be a strict regular expression. Refer to the following regular expression examples 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-s).)*$ -- 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 within operator for the Agent IP Address, only IPv4 range is supported.

      • Agent Tag: Tag applied on the PATROL Agent.
        Important: The agent tag value cannot contain special characters such as single quotation marks ('), double quotation marks ("), ampersand (&), angle brackets (< >), pipe (|), and braces ({ }).

   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 ; to remove an existing condition, click .
   5. (Optional) To group the conditions, use the following parentheses and Boolean operators from their corresponding lists:
      • (
      • ((
      • (((
      • )
      • ))
      • )))
      • AND
      • OR

7. Add other configurations in any or all of the following tabs by clicking them:

   • Monitoring

   • Deactivate Collection

   • Polling Intervals

   • Configuration Variables
      

8. Save the monitor policy.

To enable or disable a monitor policy

To enable a policy, select the Configuration > Monitor Policies page, click the action menu of a disabled policy, and click Enable. 

To disable a policy, select the Configuration > Monitor Policies page, click the action menu of an enabled policy, and click Disable.

After enabling or disabling a policy, ensure that you wait for a few minutes before changing the status again.

After you disable a monitor policy, all entities that are associated with the PATROL Agent (device) are deleted from the Monitors tab on the Device Details page. Deleting this entity closes all associated alarm events on the Events page.

The reason for the alarm event closure is displayed on the Logs and Notes tab on the Event Details page of the alarm event. For more information, see Viewing or adding notes to an event.

To edit a monitor policy

1. On the Configuration > Monitor Policies page, click the action menu of the policy that you want to modify and select Edit .
2. (Optional) For the KMs that support file-based monitoring, add or edit the configuration files by performing the following actions:
   1. In the Monitoring tab, for the monitoring solution that has file-based monitoring enabled, click the action menu and select Files.
   2. In the Add Configuration files dialog box, perform one of the following actions:
      • To add a file, click Add and see Configuring and maintaining monitor policy configurations for instructions about adding a configuration file.
      • To delete a file, click the action menu of the file and click Delete.
      • To download a file, click the action menu of the file and click Download. 

   3. Click Save.

      Important

      You can add or edit the configuration files only for PATROL Agents version 23.3.00 or later. If a PATROL Agent is upgraded to version 23.3.00 after you created and enabled a monitor policy, you must disable the policy and enable it again to be able to upload configuration files from the monitor policy.

3. Make other updates to the policy and save the changes.

To copy a monitor policy

Before copying the policy, ensure the following:

• The user that you plan to use in the new policy belongs to the associated user group in the original policy.
• The associated user group in the new policy can access the monitoring solutions and configurations of the original policy. Without this, the monitoring solutions and configurations will not be available in the new policy.

On the Configuration > Monitor Policies page, click the action menu of the policy that you want to copy and select  Copy. The Create Policy page is displayed with the configurations of the copied policy. You can modify the configurations according to your requirements.  If you have configured credentials in the policy, ensure that you update the credentials to access the host.

To filter monitor policies and view the applicable Agent details

Go to Configuration > Monitor Policies to view all monitor policies. You can filter the policies on this page to view applicable Agent details.

• To filter policies, use any or all of the following checkboxes:
  • Enabled
  • Disabled
  • Shared
  • Not Shared
  • Internal

• To view applicable Agent details:
  1. Click a policy action menu.
  2. Click View Applicable Agents to view the information on the Selected Agents page.
     Use the Search Agent Name field to search for specific agents.  

To delete a monitor policy

On the Configuration > Monitor Policies page, follow these steps:

1. If the policy that you want to delete is enabled, disable it.
2. Click the action menu for the policy, and click Delete.
3. Click Yes on the confirmation message window.

Viewing the audit trail of monitor policies

As a tenant administrator, you can use the BMC Helix Audit Dashboard in BMC Helix Dashboards, to view the trail of the changes that were made to monitor policies. You can view the trail of the following operations:

• Create, edit, delete
• Policy status change
• Policy applied on the PATROL Agent

For instructions on opening the BMC Helix Audit Dashboard and for other details, see BMC Helix Audit Dashboard.

The following image displays the audit trail of monitor policies in the BMC Helix Audit Dashboard. Note that the selected resource type is MONITORING POLICY.