Features

In Germain, alerting is a core functionality that enables your teams to react to SLA breaches in monitored environments, whether they are Technology SLAs, Business Process SLAs or User Experience SLAs. These alerts can be triggered by basic ingested data, correlated data, query mechanisms ( see Automation - SQL execution )  and HTTP actions ( see  Automation - Http(s) execution ).

There are some key concepts in order to fully understand how alerting works, but in a nutshell, once a data point is ingested and an SLA evaluated for that data point, we are able to configure an action to trigger, one of these actions types is an AlertAction which will notify a target group of users - Distribution List - by sending a message defined by a template.

Alerting Diagram


Configure

Steps to configure an Alert

In order to configure alerting you'll need to follow these steps:

  1. Define a distribution list

  2. Create the AlertAction

  3. Associate the AlertAction with an SLA

  4. Create or customize a Template

Alert Object Reference

Workspace Field Label

Configuration Key

Description

Possible Values

Default Value

Name

name

Unique Action Name

String


Distribution List

alertGroupName

Name of the alert distribution group for this alert.

String, matching an existing Distribution List


Execute via Engine

remote

*Calculated Field* if set to true, allows target server be defined

Triggered by SLAs


*Calculated Field* Collection of SLAs this action is configured for



Quiet Time Used

quietTimeUsed

If set, alerts of this type will not fire again during the quiet time period after the initial occurrence.

For More details please see our dedicated documentation page: Quiet Time

Boolean, true/false

true

Quiet TIme Period

quietTimePeriod

Quiet time period (in seconds) to use for this alert. If set to 0, will use default quiet time period.

Integer ( seconds )


Logging Enabled

loggingEnabled


Boolean, true/false


Notify On Success

notifyOnSuccess


Boolean, true/false


Notify On Failure

notifyOnFailure


Boolean, true/false


Execution Count

limitCount

Used in combination with limitInterval to define upper limit on how many times to execute this action.

Integer


Execution Interval

limitInterval

Used in combination with limitCount to defines interval during which upper limit applies.

String, one of the following values:
YEAR, MONTH, WEEK, DAY, HOUR, MINUTE


Number of Retries

numberOfRetires

*Advanced Field* Number of retries which needs to be performed of incase of a delivery failure.

Integer

0

Alert Template

Germain Workspace > Left Menu > System>Alert Templates

More details: Alert Template Reference


Example

As an example, here what i did to setup an Email Alert that needs to be sent whenever CPU Usage SLA is violated/exceeded.

  • I'll start by confirming that I have a CPU Usage KPI by navigating to Analytics > KPIs


Here I have confirmed I have the KPI configured and that there is also an SLA defined.

  • Configure Alert

    • Open the Wizard: Germain Workspace >left menu>Automation>Alert page> click + icon

    • Setup the Alert
      Name: infrastructure-alert-action
      Distribution: Either select an existing distribution or create a new one by clicking the + sign and following the distribution creation wizard.

    • Setup the SLA
      SLA: Select the CPU Usage SLA that was previously configured or create a new SLA

    • Template Configuration

      Configure your Alert Template (left menu>System) and select CPU Usage

    • We now have a fully configured alert that will be sent out once a CPU Usage SLA breach is identified

  • Note that this AlertAction is not restricted only to CPU Usage SLA and can be reused across other SLAs, if we would like to also notify the same distribution of Memory Usage SLA breaches we could click on the + sign next to Triggered by SLAs and link it to any other existing SLA by selecting as many SLAs you would like to link with this Action in the displayed Wizard: