Yin Yang

Yin Yang

There are many natural dualities in the world. There's high and low, close and far, male and female, soft and hard. What about computer problems? They have solutions or fixes.

A good problem management system needs to deal with fixes as well as problems. If you just keep a list of problems, it quickly becomes too large to manage.

The best case is when the system can detect that a problem has been fixed. For example, many SNMP MIBs have traps or notifications for problem resolution. In this case it is possible to automatically determine when a problem is corrected.

Not all fixes, however, are detectable by software. In these cases, a mechanism must be provided for operators to manually enter that a problem has been corrected.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Event Based Notifications

Fire AlarmModern networking equipment, servers, and software are capable of monitoring their own health and taking action when there is a problem. Several standardized protocols are used, including SNMP, WBEM, and JMX. The failure of a hardware or software component is an event that requires attention. ArteMon abstracts this concept into a monitor event. Data managers define monitor events that can be used by the incident management systems. For example, SNMP traps are defined as monitor events by the SNMP data manager.

Monitor events can be configured to send ArteMon notifications. They contain a set of standard properties that describe the notification. You select which monitor events should send notifications, their severity levels, and other properties of the notification.

To allow for even more customization, you can provide JavaScript to execute before a notification is sent. The JavaScript has access to all of the notification's properties, which it can change. The JavaScript can even cancel the notification.

Notification propertiesStandard Properties

All ArteMon notifications contain a standard set of properties, shown in the table below. Event based notifications also contain a collection of name-value pairs that can be added by a data manager. For SNMP traps and notifications, the SNMP data provider adds all of the bound variables or objects.

 

Standard Notification Properties

Name Description Instance Name URL
Id Timestamp Probable Cause Corrective Action
Category IP Address Severity Source Type
Subcategory Node Name Prior Severity Source Reason

Associated notificationsAssociated Notifications

Different event based notifications can be associated into a group. When different events signal a change of status, this allows notifications to accurately reflect the latest state. This is particularly useful when an event signals that a previous problem has been corrected. As an example, the MIB2 linkUp trap can be used to clear a previous linkDown notification.

Generated notificationsGenerated Notifications

Some vendors use a single event to report on many different problems. For example, some products use a single SNMP trap for all of their events. Specific details are then provided in the bound variables of the trap. ArteMon's generated notifications allow you to handle these situations. You can generate an ArteMon notification by mapping the bound variables to the properties of the notification.