Alerting and Escalation

Alerts on performance problems, errors, or configuration changes

Your business depends on thousands of interrelated moving parts. You need to keep an eye on all of them, all the time. With HQ alerting and escalation you can automatically take action to prevent problems, raise the flag when problems do occur, and reduce the mean time to resolution.

Detect and deflect problems: some problems are small; some start small and get big. Hyperic alerting is your early warning system for prevention, damage control, and resolution. HQ's built-in knowledge about your software resources and their historical behavior is the foundation for a powerful alerting strategy. You can:

• Set alerts on a single resource, a group of resources, all resources of the same type, or an application.
• Define alert conditions based on metric thresholds, inventory property changes, configuration changes, and log events.
• Define complex alerts based on multiple conditions, including baseline behavior.
• Define alerts that are informed by the relationships among resources, so you won't be inundated with a hundred warnings if one will do the job. 

Respond with action: Hyperic alerts support a host of responses, from a heads-up to a system shutdown. Depending on the conditions that trigger an alert, you may want to simply know that it happened, collect some diagnostics, issue a problem ticket, or run a control action that solves the problem or prevents downstream consequences. When an alert fires, you can automatically:

• Notify an individual or a group by email or SMS.
• Send a problem report to another management system.
• Perform a control action, like garbage collection, database vacuuming, or server restart.
• Run a script that performs any set of steps you wish.

Escalate to ensure resolution: time and system problems wait for no man, and bad news rarely improves with age. If there is no response to an alert notification, an HQ escalation scheme can ensure that a problem doesn't fall through the crack. With an escalation scheme you can define a series of alert responses to occur—if your first notification fails to elicit a response, you can spread the word, or take a different action. Coupled with HQ's alert calendar feature, escalation schemes allow 24x7 and global organizations to issue notifications and assign responsibility based on time of day.