Defining alerts for applications

Define alerts for changes in the configuration, attributes, and performance of the hosts, volumes, filesets, and shares in your application.

About this task

You can quickly identify and address the critical conditions that are detected on the hosts, volumes, filesets, and shares in your application by using alerts. Application alerts can be helpful in the following situations:
  • When you want to apply different thresholds to internal resources of the same type on a storage system.

    For example, you have production applications and test applications that use volumes on a SAN Volume Controller. The production applications require response times of 6 milliseconds or less while the test applications can tolerate response times up to 30 milliseconds. You can use application alerts to set separate response time thresholds for volumes used by the different applications, depending on the needs of that application.

  • When you want to quickly define alerts for multiple resources of the same type. You can define alerts once for the application and the alerts apply to all the resources of that type in the application.

    For example, if your application uses multiple hosts, you can define the host alerts once for the application and the alerts apply to all the hosts. If you later add more hosts to the application, the existing application alerts apply to those hosts also.

Tips for working with alerts in application hierarchies:
  • When you define an application alert for a resource such as a volume, the alert applies to all the resources of that type that belong to that application and all child applications.
  • If you define an application alert for a resource such as a host, and the host also belongs to child applications, the alert is generated once at the parent application level. Separate alerts are not generated for each of the child applications that contain the host.
  • If a child application has the same alert as a parent application but with different conditions, separate alerts are generated for the child application for the different alert conditions.