Viewing Alarms
This section, covers the following key areas:
Filtering the Alarm List
You can filter the list according to different criteria by clicking in the top-left corner of the list and changing the settings in the Alarm Filter dialog box.
For example, you can filter the list of alarms to show only Current or Historical alarms. Select Current to shows all outstanding alarms. This is essentially the current outstanding set of alarms that need to be addressed. Use Current if you want to see what is immediately noteworthy. In contrast to Current, Historical shows all alarms that fired during a certain interval, regardless of whether they are active or cleared.
Use Historical if you want to see what is happening in your monitored environment during a specific time range.
In the Alarm Filter dialog box, you can also set a number of other parameters to help you filter the list, and you can set the maximum number of results to display in the table.
Viewing Alarm Details
To view details about an alarm, click its severity icon in the Alarm(s) list. Information about that alarm is displayed in the Alarm Details dialog box. Depending on how a rule is set up, the Alarms Details view varies.
This dialog box shows the alarm’s service level impact and its full history. The history includes all consecutive alarms fired by the same rule on the same object (instance) regardless of the dashboard’s time range.
In addition, this dialog box displays a diagnostics and a recommended action message to assist you in resolving the problem. Click one of the provided links to display a drilldown page that will assist you in diagnosing the problem.
For example, if an alarm is fired because the credentials were not established when trying to connect to a host machine, drilldown links to credential details are provided. Click the Diagnostics link to display the Credentials Query dialog box. From there, you can configure the credential query that triggered the alarm.
Click the Recommended Action link to display the Manage Credential dashboard. From there you can map each credential to one or more resources, choosing the parameters and patterning criteria that best suit your needs.
You can also drill down from this dialog box to investigate the severity of the alarm in more detail. For example, click the icon in the Service Level Impact table for information about the service whose Service Level Agreement is affected by the alarm. Performing impact analysis on an alarm helps you to determine the priority of the problem that caused the alarm to fire.
Investigating the Alarm Source
In the Alarms table, the Instance field lists the object in your monitored environment that is the source of the alarm. Click the listing for an alarm source to display its health summary. The health summary shows the number of alarms by severity and the health of the alarm source and lists the agents and host associated with the alarm source.
In addition, it provides a list of related views that show quick drilldowns to help identify the root cause. This list is based on the views that match the type of the alarm source. If no related views are available, then the default views (for example, Configuration > Data browser) are provided.
Adding Alarm Notes
Using alarm notes is a handy way to record information about an alarm for other users to view. For example, if an urgent alarm comes up that you want to investigate, you can add a note to the alarm that you are checking if a certain process is causing the problem. The note is attached to the alarm along with your user name and a timestamp.
You can view, filter, add, and edit alarm notes from the Alarm Details dialog box. Use the History tab to attach notes to a particular alarm in the history table. Use the All Notes tab to attach a note to the most recent alarm in the alarm history.
