Manually combing through a multitude of alarms and events to gain contextual information about any potential performance bottleneck is cumbersome. This is why reducing the noise associated with alarms is a priority.
For instance, consider that your data center has 10 UPS systems in place. You need to receive a priority-one alarm if seven out of the 10 systems go down, a priority-two alarm if five systems go down, and a priority-three alarm if three systems go down. Instead of configuring multiple monitors for individual devices for different priority levels, you can configure a single Alarm Correlation Rule and apply it to all the devices. This ensures not only network-level dependency but business-level dependency.
Network admins can't monitor their infrastructure for individual metrics and instead need to contextually combine various metrics of multiple devices to get the whole picture. Contextual correlation of alarms and monitoring your infrastructure proactively for such predefined criteria will help you prioritize alarms and rectify issues at the earliest.
Furthermore, a single system can be monitored by multiple teams for multiple priorities. So rather than configuring multiple monitors for different priority levels for the same device, all you need to do is configure a single correlation rule and add it to the respective devices.
This is where ManageEngine OpManager's Alarm Correlation Rule comes in. Using OpManager's Alarm Correlation Rule, users can configure predefined correlation criteria between various monitors. This allows them to configure alarms for specific scenarios rather than configure individual thresholds for each monitor.
Given the number of devices and interfaces associated with an enterprise network, it is understandable that finding meaningful alarm patterns to act upon is easier said than done. Now, couple this with complex topology and a heterogeneous nature, and you will find yourself struggling to keep up. Hence, tracking and rectifying alarms individually isn't a scalable approach.
Furthermore, as an IT admin, you will have to deal with alerts from different sources, natures (manual or automatic), and velocities across your entire IT spectrum. By automating your threshold configuration process and using the Alarm Correlation Rule to reduce the alarm noise during the initial learning curve, you can ensure that the data model is trained properly with clear historical data and usage patterns while also effectively managing the cascade of alerts. This way you can properly capture, track, and analyze alarms to rectify underlying bottlenecks, helping you ensure infrastructure uptime and optimum performance.
By configuring an Alarm Correlation Rule and associating a notification profile, you can automatically forward the alarms from OpManager to the respective third-party tool, helping you track and rectify issues as soon as possible. You can leverage multiple channels, such as email, SMS, or ticketing, to forward the alarms. This also helps you prioritize issues accordingly and remediate issues quickly. This results in an optimized mean time to repair (MTTR), which further leads to management of a network that is less prone to outages and disruptions.
In IT operations management, contextual information is incredibly crucial to make well-informed decisions. Using OpManager's Alarm Correlation Rule, you can predefine criteria to look for meaningful contextual information, and OpManager will send out alarms when the configured criteria has been met. This helps you easily and quickly remediate issues.
For instance, consider that you are an IT admin of an e-commerce company, and one of your virtual machine servers hosting your site is experiencing high CPU utilization. While this might be attributed to increased usage, correlating it with other metrics, such as process monitors, event log monitors, and VM resource allocation, might help you discover that the high utilization is due to a resource-intensive process.
The process seems to have appeared only after a software update that was recently rolled out. Furthermore, the event log monitor reveals the CPU spike to coincide closely with software updates. By correlating the available contextual information, you can conclude that the update was not optimized for the virtual environment.
Once the alarm has been captured, you can also choose to automate the preliminary remediation process. Using OpManager's workflow feature, you can automate the preliminary actions to be taken, such as restarting a server, acknowledging an alarm, or executing a script, etc. By automating these actions, you can expedite the fault remediation process and get your service up and running in no time. This enhances your network uptime and also streamlines your operational processes.
Learn how to configure Alarm Correlation Rules in OpManager. For a technical demo of the product assisted by our experts, fill out this form.
Learn more about OpManager.
