Overview of 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 example, you can collect information about the CPU and memory utilization of your Windows environment.
A monitor policy is applied to the PATROL Agents based on conditions such as Agent name, Agent port, Agent version, Agent tag, and so on. PATROL Agents collect performance data and generate events for availability metrics.
When PATROL Agents are deployed and monitor policies are configured, the Agents receive the appropriate configuration and begin monitoring. When an existing policy is modified, the changes are automatically applied to the Agents.
As a tenant administrator, you can create, edit, delete, copy, enable or disable, and filter monitor policies. You can also view an audit trail of all updates made to monitor policies. For more information, see Defining monitor policies.
Policy precedence
Policy precedence is the priority for policy execution. It ranges from 0 to 999. A lower number indicates a higher priority. Policy precedence controls the configuration applied to the PATROL Agents and servers when conflicting or overlapping configurations are defined between two or more monitor policies.
If two policies attempt to manage the same variable, such as /AgentSetup/historyRetentionPeriod, the PATROL Agent resolves the conflict by evaluating the precedence of the involved policies. Consider the following examples:
| Example: with conflict | Example: without conflict |
|---|---|
Policy A: Precedence number - 099 Includes configuration for the amount of history the Agent should retain. /AgentSetup/historyRetentionPeriod - 7 (retention in days) | Policy A: Precedence number - 699 Includes configuration for monitoring the following Microsoft Windows services:
|
Policy B: Precedence number - 070 Includes configuration for the amount of history the Agent should retain. /AgentSetup/historyRetentionPeriod - 1 (retention in days) | Policy B: Precedence number - 499 Includes configuration for monitoring the following Microsoft Windows services:
|
| When monitor policies A and B are applied to a PATROL Agent | |
The Agent resolves the conflict that is related to the /AgentSetup/historyRetentionPeriod variable by evaluating the precedence values of the policies. Because Policy B (070) has a lower precedence value than Policy A (099), Policy B (070) is applied to the Agent. Therefore, the retention period is set to 1 day. Remember the rule: Lower the number, higher the precedence. | The Agent is configured according to the union of policy A and policy B because there are no conflicts. All the Windows services configured in policy A and policy B are monitored. |
BMC recommends that you define a precedence numbering system. This can help you group related monitor policies to the numeric ranges of the precedence numbers.
See the following table for some suggestions:.
| Precedence range | Applicable for | Additional information |
|---|---|---|
001 – 049 | Temporary policy overrides | Use for a short term for specific monitor policies until a complete policy is developed. |
050 – 099 | Monitor policies for low-level behavior management in Agents | Use for monitor policies that you always want to enforce. For example, Agent tuning, event propagation. |
100 – 299 | Monitor policies that are specific to a logical group of servers | Use for monitor policies such as vCenter monitoring, Exchange Servers, Oracle Servers, Location Related Servers or Services, Agent tuning overrides, and so on. |
300 – 499 | Specific platform variance monitor policies | Use for monitor policies such as Remote OS monitoring, Windows 2008 monitoring, Linux 6.7 monitoring, Specific Windows services, Specific UNIX processes, and so on. |
500 – 699 | Standard platform monitor policies | Apply as a standard to large groups of Agents. For example, All Windows, all Linux, and so on. |
700 – 899 | Other platform monitor policies | Use for examples such as Storage, Network, SNMP, PING, AWS, Azure, and so on. |
950 – 999 | Prepackaged monitor policies | Reserved for the BMC prepackaged monitor policies. You get these policies when you import the PATROL repository. |
File-based monitoring
When you configure a monitor policy, you can upload configuration files for Agents that support file-based monitoring, where configuration files store all the required information for monitoring, such as the remote host name. You do not have to upload the configuration files manually on each Agent that supports file-based monitoring. You can add a single or multiple configuration files for an Agent while creating the monitor policy.
Scenario Sarah is an administrator at Apex Global. She uploads configuration files on PATROL Agents so that the knowledge modules (KMs) or monitoring solutions can collect data based on the inputs in the files. Sarah is looking for an alternative to manually uploading the files because of the following challenges:
Sarah can upload configuration files while she creates or edits a monitor policy in BMC Helix Operations Management. She can include multiple configuration files in the same policy. |
On the Configuration > Monitor Policies page, the following monitor policies are available out-of-the-box:
- Predefined policy for Linux
- Predefined policy for Windows
- Policy for rotated API key push
The Monitor Policies page
View all monitor policies on the Configuration > Monitor Policies page.
If a PATROL solution is added to the authorization profile that you are a part of, you can view the policies created for the solution. You cannot view the policies if the PATROL solution is removed from the authorization profile.
The following table describes the Monitor Policy page:
| User interface snapshot | Description |
|---|---|
 | Use the buttons as described below:
|
 | Use the following filters to view specific monitor policies:
|
 | Search for specific monitor policies. You can use a few characters from the monitor policy name to locate a specific policy. You can also use a user name to look for policies created by the user. |
 | The list of monitor policies. By default, you can see 25 policies at once on the Monitor Policies page. Use the pagination at the bottom of the page to perform the following actions:
The following policies are available out of the box:
|
 | Click the Actions menu
If you select a policy on the Monitor Policies page, you can see the Action menu options at the top:
If you select multiple policies, only the Enable and Disable options are available at the top:
You can only view internal policies. You cannot perform any action on them. Therefore, the selection check box for internal policies is disabled as shown in the following image:
|
for any policy to view the following options:
