Alarm Policies
To access this page, click on the 
icon available in the Admin tab. Then, select the Alarm Policies option in the Alerts tile. The eG Enterprise system includes four predefined alarm policies namely standard, immediate, shortterm, and longterm that are used by the system to determine when to generate alarms. For instance there might be an instantaneous spike in the CPU utilization of a system. While an instantaneous spike may not be a problem, a set of periodic spikes or a persistent increase in the measurement may indicate a problem. To differentiate between these different scenarios, the eG Enterprise system uses two parameters Measurements Window and Number of Violations. The Measurements Window represents the number of measurement values that are considered in determining the current state of a measurement. A violation indicates a measurement being in violation of its threshold (i.e. a measurement value being lower than its lower threshold value, or a measurement value being higher than its upper threshold value). The number of violations denotes the number of times a measurement has crossed its threshold. Each of eG's alarm policies defines a measurement and number of violations. For example, an immediate policy has a Measurements Window of 1 and Number of violations. This means only one measurement value is considered in determining the state of a measurement. If the current value exceeds the upper threshold limit, the measurement is said to be in an abnormal state (since number of violations is 1).
As its name indicates, this policy is ideal for cases where the administrator needs to be immediately alerted when an anomaly occurs. Metrics such as network / application availability can be monitored using this policy. For some other metrics, an administrator may not wish to be bothered about a sporadic threshold violation and may prefer to be alerted if a problem remains for a period of time. The standard alarm policy can be ideal for this, as it has a Measurement of 6, with number of violations as 4.
By default, this page is split into two distinct panels. The Pre-defined alarm policy panel will display all the default alarm policies. The User defined alarm policy panel will display all custom alarm policies. By default, the pre-defined alarm policies will be arranged in the Ascending order of their measurement values. You can change the sort order to Descending, by simply clicking on the column head, MEASUREMENTS WINDOW, in the Pre-defined alarm policy panel. You can modify any of the default policies by clicking on the icon corresponding to that policy, but you cannot delete the default policies.
New policies can be added using the Add New Policy button. Once you define your own policies, then those will also be listed in this page under the USER DEFINED ALARM POLICY section. Unlike default policies, a user-defined policy can be modified and/or deleted. Deleting an existing policy is possible using the icon.
Until a newly added policy is associated with a measure, the icon corresponding to that policy (in the User defined alarm policy panel) will be disabled. As soon as the policy is associated with a measure, this icon will become enabled. You can click on this icon to view the measures that are currently associated with the corresponding policy. This information is typically useful when attempting to determine which measures will be impacted when modifying an alarm policy.
To quickly locate a default policy for modifying, provide the whole/part of the alarm policy name to search for in the Search text box in the Pre-defined alarm policy panel, and click the ‘magnifying glass’ icon next to it. To quickly locate a user-defined policy for modifying/deleting, provide the whole/part of the alarm policy name to search for in the Search text box in the User defined alarm policy panel, and click the ‘magnifying glass’ icon next to it.