Alarms are defined in Rule Sets or for specific devices. A device inherits all of the alarms from any associated Rule Set(s). The alarm thresholds defined at the Rule Set level are ‘Shared’ among all the devices in the Rule Set; changing thresholds at the Rule Set level effects all associated devices, except where they are overridden by device-specific alarms.

Alarms may be modified from different locations within the dashboard, with different contexts:

  • By editing the ‘Shared Alarms’ in a Rule Set, which affects all devices associated with that Rule Set (Finder->Policy->Rule Set->Alarms).
  • By selecting specific device(s) ‘Devices’ drop down list of any alarm configuration section.
  • By opening a device’s configuration dialog window and editing an alarm (which will pre-populate the alarms ‘Devices’ drop down list).
  • By clicking on the Alarm name listed for an active alert, which will open the device’s configuration dialog and jump to that alarm configuration (which will pre-populate the alarms ‘Devices’ drop down list).

Device-specific Alarms

Any alarm can be overridden for any specific device. The conditions of a device-specific alarm will be evaluated rather than the equivalent ‘Shared Alarm’ within the same Rule Set, including disabled conditions.

For example:

  • Let’s say you define the ‘Partition Available Space’ alarm at the Rule Set level to trigger a ‘down’ alert if any disk is equal to 0%, and to trigger a ‘critical’ alert if any disk is less than 10%.
  • You have a specific agent device that should never fall below 10,000MB or 90% and you only want ‘critical’ alerts for it; never ‘down’.
  • Rather than edit the alarm via the Rule Set configuration screen, you would open that specific device’s configuration screen, navigate to the ‘Alarms & Thresholds’ section and edit the Partition Space alarm by disabling ‘down’ and changing the ‘critical’ thresholds.
  • The ‘Shared Alarm’ that would otherwise get inherited from the Rule Set will no longer apply for that specific device. You will not receive ‘down’ alerts for that device, and you will receive ‘critical’ alerts only if the device-specific thresholds are triggered.

Instance-specific Alarms

A single metric type may be monitored and alerted for multiple instances.

For example, ‘C:\’ and ‘D:\’ are two different instances of partitions that may be monitored by an agent on Windows (automatically detected and monitored). The Partition Available Space alarm may apply to both instances, and alerts will be triggered for the same thresholds if only ‘Shared’ or ‘Device-specific’ alarms are defined for any Rule Set that the device falls under. However, if an instance-specific alarm is defined for ‘C:\’, it will override all conditions of any ‘Shared’ or ‘Device-specific’ alarms.

Instance-specific alarms can be defined for specific devices, and combined with other device-specific alarms. Instances cannot be defined for ‘Shared Alarms’; only device-specific alarm may be instance-specific or not.