Rule, Actions and performance issues

As IBM® Sterling Control Center Monitor events are generated, they are processed by the RuleService in the EP they originated from, and the number of rules defined, and the actions associated with rules that are triggered, can have a large impact on the performance of IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor.

Tip: Disable or delete all IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor rules, including built-in rules, that are not being used to improve IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor performance.

IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor can typically handle having 1000s of enabled rules without incurring performance problems, but while some actions such as email actions, have little impact on IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor performance, others can have a large, negative, impact such as, OS Commands and Alert 0 actions.

OS Commands

OS Commands specify a script, or batch file, IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor is to perform when a rule is triggered by an event. When a script or batch file initiated by IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor takes a long time to run it delays processing of other events by IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor so be sure they always run quickly. When a script or batch file is initiated by IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor an engine log entry is written that explains how long it took to run.
Tip: When scripts or batch files will take more than a few milli-seconds to run, have them execute whatever they do asynchronously, instead of synchronously, when possible.

Alert 0

Alert 0 is a special alert action that tells ICC to find, and handle, any alerts that are related to the event that triggered that rule. To find alerts related to an event, IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor runs one, or more, SQL statements and that SQL causes contention on the IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor EVENTS table and can result in noticeable performance issues.

Tip: Since alerts can only be related to another when they are generated by the same SLC instance or by a linked Rule, Alert 0 actions should only be specified in conjunction with linked rules, or a rule whose criteria matches SLC events. Beware that some built-in rules may violate this principle.

Erroneous Alert 0 actions are something to look for whenever you notice event broadcasting performance is slow, which occurs in the Rule service, the EventMonitorService, and more. In most cases where Alert 0 actions are used erroneously, the No operation action should be used instead.