Working with Alarms

Alarms are triggered when problems arise in your monitored environment. Foglight fires alarms when a rule determines that certain pre-defined conditions are met.

To view alarms:

  1. Sign in to Foglight Cloud with your Quest account.
  2. From the left navigation pane click Alarm Management and select Alarms.

The Alarm Dashboard page is displayed. Use this dashboard to view the state of alarms across your monitored environment and take immediate action on them. It shows alarm counts by time, allowing you to identify excessive alarm counts or outage events.

The Alarms dashboard shows the information of system alarms and changes, and facilitates the investigation of top issues in your environment.

This section, covers the following key areas:

The Alarms Dashboard includes the following elements:

  • Alarms by time: Refer to Alarm(s) for the Entire System and Viewing Alarms.

  • Heatmap: Heatmap visualizes components by alarms. In the heatmap, the size of the block is determined by the numbers of current alarms related to the component, and the color is determined by the highest severity level of the alarms related to the component.

  • Alarms Analysis tab: Refer to Alarms Analysis.

  • Foglight Today: This feature allows you to easily monitor and assess the status of alarms within the past hour.

  • Foglight Now: This feature provides you with a comprehensive overview of alarm statuses recorded from midnight to the current moment.

  • Blackouts tab: Displays the blackouts by objects and agent. Blackouts by objects displays the top-level objects which have their alarms suspended, and the blackouts to which they belong. Blackouts by agent displays agents which have their data collection suspended, and the blackouts to which they belong

  • Alarm Filter button: Refer to Filtering the Alarm List.


Alarms Analysis

The Alarm Analysis view is to provide a snapshot of alarms and to help you investigate top issues in your environment, so you can more proactively manage your alerts, thresholds, and monitored system. The alarm count in this view includes SLA alarms.

The maximum number of alarms for the selected time range is set to 5000 by default. To change this value, type the number in the Max Number of Evaluated Alarms field, and then click Apply.

The Max Number of Evaluated Alarms is scaled from 0 to 100,000 and is managed by the Alarm_Analysis_Max_Object variable. To change the value of this variable, search for and edit Alarm_Analysis_Max_Object from Dashboards > Administration > Rules & Notifications > Manage Registry Variables.

The Alarms Analysis (Preview) view contains the following elements:

  • Alarms by Source: Lists all alarms (cleared or non-cleared) that are triggered by the alarm source. For more information about alarm sources, click Dashboards > Administration > Rules & Notifications > Rules. Click an alarm source to display a popup and see more detailed information about an alarm. For more information, see Viewing Alarm.

  • Counts by Severity chart: Summarizes the totals for each severity of alarm (Warning, Critical, or Fatal) and the total number of alarms.


Alarm(s) for the Entire System

At the bottom of the Alarms dashboard, the view lists up to 5000 alarms for the current or historical time range. It does not list SLA alarms. You can filter the list, sort it by column, or acknowledge and clear alarms.

The alarms list also shows cleared alarms and indicates whether an alarm has been acknowledged or cleared. Cleared alarms appear dimmed and can be filtered out using the Alarm Filter dialog box. To access the Alarm Filter dialog box, click Alarm Filter in the top-left corner of the list.

To see more detailed information about an alarm, hover over or click a column to display a dwell or a popup. You can select an alarm and investigate, acknowledge, or clear it.

The alarm list view allows you to select different perspectives on alarms.