Defining custom alerts for applications

Define a custom alert to combine multiple conditions from multiple resources for an application in a single alert. By creating a custom alert, you can analyze multiple configuration, capacity, and performance conditions together to determine whether an urgent situation occurred on the servers, volumes, filesets, and shares in an application.

1. In the menu bar, select Groups > Applications.
2. Right-click an application in the list and click View Alert Definitions.
3. Click Edit Alert Definitions.
4. Click Custom.
5. Click the Create Alert icon, then enter a name for the alert.
6. Assign a severity to the alert.
   Assigning a severity can help you more quickly identify and address the critical conditions that are detected on resources. The severity that you assign depends on the guidelines and procedures within your organization.

   Option	Description
   Critical	Assign this severity to alerts that are critical and need to be resolved. For example, assign a critical severity to alerts that notify you when the Port Send Bandwidth Percentage is greater than or equal to 85%. The default severity for custom alerts is critical.
   Warning	Assign this severity to alerts that are not critical, but represent potential problems. For example, assign a warning severity to alerts that notify you when the Port Send Bandwidth Percentage is greater than or equal to 75% but less than 85%.
   Informational	Assign this severity to alerts that might not require any action to resolve and are primarily for informational purposes.

7. Select a component, category, and group for the alert.
   For example, select Volumes, Capacity, and Used Capacity.
8. For general and capacity attributes, specify the criteria for generating an alert.
   Use criteria such as greater than or equal to, less than or equal to, storage values, and time measurements to customize the conditions under which attributes generate alerts.
   For example, for a capacity attribute such as Used Capacity, you can specify that an alert is generated when the amount of used capacity on a resource is more than or equal to 75%. The operator (less than or equal to) + a specified amount of space (75) + the unit of measurement (%) is the criteria that determines if an alert is generated.

   Tips:

   • Not all attributes require criteria for generating alerts. The category and type of an attribute determines whether you can specify criteria and the options that you can select.
   • Some attributes can use the operators such as is, is not, and changes. For example, for the Used Inodes attribute for a fileset, select the operator changes to be notified if the current number of used inodes for a fileset changes.
9. For performance attributes, click Add Metrics. Specify the criteria for generating an alert.
   Criteria includes an operator and a threshold value.
   1. Select an operator.
      An operator determines if an alert is triggered when the performance of a resource is greater than or equal to or less than or equal to the specified threshold value.
   2. Enter a threshold value.
      For example, to trigger an alert if the Total I/O Rate for a volume is greater than or equal to 500 ops/s, enter the value 500.

      Tips for threshold values:

      • For metrics that measure throughput and response times, thresholds can vary because of workload, model of hardware, amount of cache memory, and other factors. In these cases, there are no recommended values. To help determine threshold values for a resource, collect performance data over time to establish a baseline of the normal and expected performance behavior for that resource. After you determine a set of baseline values, define alerts to trigger if the measured performance behavior falls outside the normally expected range.
      • For some metrics, lower values might indicate more stress and higher values might indicate idle behavior. For example, a lower threshold value for the Cache Holding Time Threshold metric might indicate a performance problem.
10. Optional: Click View Performance to view a chart of the performance of the resource. Use the chart to evaluate the current and historical performance of a resource to help determine the threshold value for an alert.
    The chart uses colored lines to represent the different threshold values and severities that can be defined for an alert:

    • Critical alert: red
    • Warning alert: orange
    • Information alert: blue

    To customize the chart, click Top 10 or Bottom 10 to show resources according to their performance, click a time period, and change the start and end dates for the data that is displayed.
11. Optional: If you want to send email notifications of alert violations to contacts other than the policy contacts or global alert notification addresses, enter the email addresses in the Email Override field.
    Tip: If you enter an email address in the Email Override field, only that email address receives notifications for the alert. The following contacts do not receive notifications:

    • Any email addresses that are specified as policy contacts, if the alert is in an alert policy.
    • Any global email addresses that are specified for alert notifications. To view the global alert notification addresses, go to Settings > Notification Settings.
12. Optional: Click View Additional Options to specify how frequently you are notified of alerts.
    Use these settings to avoid triggering too many alerts for some conditions.
13. Add another condition to the custom alert and repeat steps 7 - 11.
    If you do not want to add another condition, continue to the next step.
14. Click Save Changes.