Alerts

User Role and Alerts

Super Admin, Users with Admin rights or App Admin rights for an application can add/view alerts related to that application. User with read only access for an application can only view predefined alerts on the application.

Applicare automatically generate few platform alerts such as CPU, Disk and Memory utilization for the agents if the Applicare is configured in MySQL and Oracle database.

Configure Alerts

Applicare provides the ability to set alerts and send email notifications based on user defined conditions. Applicare provides following types of alerts

Tools -> Manage Alerts allows creation, editing, pausing or activating alerts. It also allows assigning a command for execution when an alert is fired. Applicare allows any shell/command script execution on any location where Applicare agent is running. This is very valuable for doing diagnosis or taking remediation actions when a certain alert is generated.

For creating high CPU utilization alert select New and platform alert

Click on browser next to property and select CPU -> Usage.

Alert Trigger Threshold * Alert Monitor Job Interval defines the time interval that condition should hold before generating the alerts. Alert Monitor Job Interval by default is 1 minute but can be adjusted by adding applicare.alertMonitorJobInterval (in minutes) property to Applicare.props file. In the example below alert will be generated if the CPU usage is higher than 90 for 3 consecutive polls by Applicare. Similarly in the example below auto clear threshold defines that CPU usage needs to be below 90 for 3 consequtive polls for generating clear alert.

Intellicheck Alerts Configuration

IntelliCheck alerts are paused for intellicheckAlertsPauseTime (in minutes) after # of alert reaches the intellicheckAlertPauseThreshold limit set in Applicare.properties. With the example values below 3 IntelliCheck alerts would come for JDBC resource not available and then alerts on the same JDBC resource would be paused for 30 minutes.

intellicheckAlertsPauseTime=30

intellicheckAlertPauseThreshold=3

By default intellicheckAlertsPauseTime is 15 and intellicheckAlertPauseThreshold is 5.

Email Notifications

Before you can receive email notifications on new alerts, SMTP server details need to be configured

Select Applicare > Configuration > SMTP Configuration from the top menu.

Mail To is the catch all email address. All Applicare alerts are sent to this email address.

To customize who gets what alerts select Applicare > Tools > Manage Email Alerts from the top menu.

You can select users, add email addresses or email list addresses for receiving alerts on an application, a server or an individual alert. Applicare would send alert to emails/users defined for individual alert. If there are no specific emails/users defined for individual alerts, it would inherit the same from the server or the application it is part of e.g. If portalLX application alerts are sent to Larry and no other specifics are defined for servers that are a part of portalLX or individual alerts then all the alert emails for portalLX would be sent to Larry. Once a specific email address/s and users are defined for either server alerts or individual alerts then that overrides the application alert settings.

If emails/users settings are changed for an application after defining setting for individual alerts or server alerts, they would be overwritten by the newly defined settings for the application.

Advanced Options

From the configuration screen, you can enable  or disable alerting.

Select Applicare > Configuration > Advanced Options from the top menu.

Using A Custom Alert Processing Class

You can write a Java class which will be invoked for each alert created by Applicare agents by implementing the interface com.arcturus.alerts.notifications.AlertAction and the only method in the interface public void processAlert(AlertQueue alert). You can get the details of the alert using the getter methods of AlertQueue object as shown in the example class below.

package com.arcturus.alerts.notifications;

import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;

import com.arcturus.alerts.domain.AlertQueue;

public class SampleAction implements com.arcturus.alerts.notifications.AlertAction{

    public void processAlert(AlertQueue alert) {
        System.out.println("Server: " + alert.getServer()); //the server name where the alert was generated
        System.out.println("Type: " + alert.getSubsystem()); //type of the alert (JMX_ALERT, PLATFORM_ALERT, etc..)
        System.out.println("Priority: " + alert.getPriority()); //priority of the alert
        System.out.println("Message: " + alert.getMessage()); //user defined message in alert definition (description)
        SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss");
        System.out.println("Created: " + dateFormat.format(alert.getCreated())); //time the alert was created
    }
}         

To deploy the class and any dependent classes, you can package it in a jar file and copy to Applicare/server/ext folder (create it if it doesn't exist) and restart Applicare server.

Note: When compiling you will have to include Applicare/server/webapps/applicare/WEB-INF/classes folder in your classpath.

Once the server is restarted, go to Applicare > Configuration > Advanced Options and provide the fully qualified class name of your custom class in the "Custom Alert Processing Class:" field and click Apply.