Policy precedence best practices

Policy precedence is the priority of a policy and ranges from 0 to 999. A lower number indicates a higher priority. Policy precedence controls the configuration applied to the PATROL Agents and Infrastructure Management servers when there are conflicting or overlapping configurations defined between two or more policies.

The following sections in this topic describe how precedence is applied and best practices regarding usage of precedence values.

Related topics

Managing-policies

Defining-a-staging-policy

Defining-a-monitoring-policy

Defining-a-blackout-policy

Policy precedence behavior

  • Policies are applied on PATROL Agents based on the Agent Selection Criteria that is defined during policy creation.
  • 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:

Important: Do not use the same precedence value

BMC recommends that you do not use the same precedence values for different policies. In such a scenario, the policies behave in the following way:

  • If polices with the same precedence value have the same KM parameters with different threshold settings, and they apply to different platforms, the policy with the latest time stamp is applied.
  • If policies with the same precedence value have different KM parameters, and they apply to the same host, both policies are applied.

Policy naming guidelines

To easily track the configurations that are applied to PATROL Agents and to know the order in which the precedence is being applied, you must keep the policies organized.

BMC recommends that you organize policies according to the precedence numbers when creating and editing policies.

Consider the following options as examples for organizing policies:

Policy precedence values

BMC recommends that you define a precedence numbering system. Related policies can then be grouped according to the numeric ranges of the precedence numbers. Consider the following chart as an example.

Assign precedence numbers starting with the highest number in the range and then continue assignment in the descending order. By doing so, you can leave the lower numbers in the range for specific use cases.

 

Tip: For faster searching, add an asterisk to the end of your partial query. Example: cert*