Defining Database Agent Alarm Settings

This video will cover defining database agent alarm settings. Users can customize how the alarm is generated by the default Foglight for SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2 rules are triggered and displayed in the Alarm Views Settings tab. All changes to alarm settings apply to the selected agents with the exception of thresholds, which can be customized by the agent. Avoid editing Foglight database agent rules that are delivered with the product in the Administration, Rules and Notifications, Rules Management dashboard. Default rules may be modified during regular software updates and your edits will be lost. Always use the Alarms View. To configure and modify the database alarm settings, log into the Foglight web console with the Foglight user and click on Databases. Select the row checkboxes beside one or more of the database agents of the same type. Click on the Configure Alarms button. The Administrative dashboard will open containing the settings for all of the selected agents. Settings are broken down into categories, which are organized under a tree. The alarms list controls the contents displayed to the right and the tasks that are available. All Alarms displays of the rules with configured alarms and indicates whether alarms are enabled. In this view, you can enable or disable alarms for all the rules at once. You can also set the email notifications and define mail server settings. Category of rules displays a set of related rules with configured alarms. In this view, you can enable or disable alarms and also set email notifications for the category of rules. Click the multiple severity rule that you want edit. In the Threshold section, review the defined severity levels and existing threshold bounds for all target agents. The colored bar across the bottom of the view indicates the percentage of collections that fall within each threshold. You can and should modify the thresholds associated with alarms to better suit your environment. If you find that alarms are firing for conditions that you consider to be acceptable, you can change the threshold values that trigger the alarm. You can also enable or disable severity levels to better suit your environment. When a rule has severity levels, a Threshold section appears in the Alarm Settings tab showing the severity levels and bounds by agent. The threshold values correspond to the lower bounds shown in this table. Many rules, such as the baseline rules, do not have severity levels and thresholds. Click the Edit button next to a single database agent name to modify the settings for that agent. When adding thresholds, ensure that the new values make sense in the context of the other threshold values. For most metrics, threshold values are set so that warning is less than critical, which is less than fatal. However, in metrics where normal performance has a higher value, such as DDSS assessed buffer cache hit rate, the threshold values are reversed where warning is more than critical, which is more than fatal. From this view, you can perform the following tasks. To edit severity levels and threshold the lower bound values for all agents, click Enhance Alarm. Select the checkboxes for the severity levels that you want enabled and set the threshold values. Click Set. Once completed, be sure to click the Save Changes button to register any updates to the system. To learn more about Foglight for Databases, visit support.quest.com and click Support Questions. Follow us on Twitter @questexperts.