Alerting

ServicePilot can alert users as soon as an event of importance occurs. It can also generate alerts proactively if a trend is likely to pass a threshold in the future. Alerts might also be held back if some event is expected to clear itself without requiring intervention.

By default, ServicePilot will present all data via its web interface but no alerts will be generated. To add alerts, new Alert Policies need to be configured. Note that Alert Policies are all independent of one another. Care is required when creating new alerts in order to avoid generating overlapping alerts that might notify users of the same issue multiple times.

To add Alert Policies, see the Policies documentation.

Each alert has three components:

• A Condition defines what will trigger the alert
• A Delay indicates if the alert should be held back for a time or a number of similar events
• An Action to take when the alert conditions have been met and any delay has been handled

Alert Condition

For an alert to trigger, certain conditions must be met. These conditions are associated with events that ServicePilot detects.

Note: Operators may mark resources, views and objects alert statuses as being acknowledged. Acknowledged elements can then be included or excluded from Alert conditions and the status view.

Note: Resource anomalies - Objects change state based on thresholds and availability. It is possible to ignore object alerts based on historical data that determines if the state of the object's resource is considered an anomaly.

Ack condition

When creating Alert Policies with conditions Objects, Views or Indicators, the Ack field can be set to include or exclude acknowledged events. There are three options for the Ack field:

Alert Delay

Although all conditions of an alert might be met, the alert action will not be taken until the delay type has been considered.

Alert Action

A number of different actions may be taken:

Note: Email actions group all alerts of the same kind every minute and send one summary email containing all of the changes. To send individual emails per alert, check the Not grouped option and specify the email subject and body text to use.

Alert variables

When an alert is triggered, information that can then be used is stored in the alert action. An email subject might therefore contain the object name that triggered the alert or a UDP syslog message might include the time at which the event occurred.

Some variables are common to all alert conditions while other variables differ depending on the action conditions used. If you need the value of an indicator above a threshold, then this will only be available for indicator condition alerts.

Acknowledge status changes

When elements in ServicePilot change status and become unavailable or have a performance issue, the object, views and resources will reflect this problem. It is possible to acknowledged the issue so that it may be discounted in the Status views and when matching alerting conditions. Acknowledging an issue will not change its status or hide the problem but a note will be visible against the acknowledged element.

If the issue is cleared and the elements become available and nominal then the acknowledgement will disappear. This may be a problem for elements that continually change between nominal and a bad status as an acknowledgement will not be maintained. In this case, a Note may be added instead as this will not be removed automatically.

Access Acknowledge/Note object from the map

Access Acknowledge/Note view from the map

1. As a user with operator privileges, navigate in the View hierarchy until the view you wish to acknowledge/note is open
2. Click on the View information icon
3. Click on the Acknowledge or Note button

Access Acknowledge/Note from status lists

Status lists' filters

Alerting examples

{
  "type": "message",
  "attachments": [{
      "contentType": "application/vnd.microsoft.card.adaptive",
      "contentUrl": null,
      "content": {
        "$schema": "http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json",
        "type": "AdaptiveCard",
        "version": "1.2",
        "body": [{
            "type": "TextBlock",
            "text": "ServicePilot object unavailable: {OBJ}"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}