Looking up device information

Specifically, you want the policy to retrieve technical specifications for the device that is causing the alert, and information about the facility and the rack number where the device is located.

To do this, the policy must perform a SELECT at the database level on the table that contains the device data and return those rows that are related to the incoming alert. Viewed from the data model perspective, the policy must get data items from the Device data type where the value of the Hostname field is the same as the value of the Node field in the alert.

To retrieve the data items, you type the following code into the Netcool®/Impact policy editor tab:

DataType = "Device";
Filter = "Hostname = '" + @Node + "'";
CountOnly = False;
					
MyDevices = GetByFilter(DataType, Filter, CountOnly);
MyDevice = MyDevices[0];
					
If (Length(MyDevices) < 1) { Log("No matching device found."); }
If (Length(MyDevices) > 1) { Log("More than one matching device found."); }

Here, GetByFilter is retrieving data items from the Device data type where the value of the Hostname field is equal to the value of the Node field in the incoming alert. The data items are stored in an array named MyDevices.

Although GetByFilter is able to return more than one data item in the array, you only expect the array to contain one data item in this situation, as each device in the database has a unique Hostname. The first element of the MyDevices array is assigned to the MyDevice variable so that MyDevice can be used as shorthand later in the policy.

Because you want to retrieve only one data item from the data type, the policy also prints error messages to the policy log if GetByFilter retrieves less than or more than one.