Hello and welcome. My name is Eric and I am in the Systems Management Senior Engineering group here
at Dell Support, and in this video we're going to cover alert policies, how to create them,
and what they do. In a previous video we covered how to get alerts flowing between our devices and
OpenManage Enterprise, and we can see the alerts coming into OpenManage Enterprise from our iDRACs.
In this video we're going to talk about alert policies. Alert policies are what the users of
OpenManage Enterprise tell OpenManage Enterprise to do with those alerts once they are received.
So what we're going to do is, we're going to go to 'Alerts' and we're going to go to 'Policies'
and there are a few built-in alert policies here in OpenManage Enterprise,
but what we want to focus on is creating new alert policies to tell OpenManage Enterprise
what to do with the alerts it receives from the devices that it's monitoring.
So we're going to click 'Create' and we're going to need to give this a name. We're going to call
this critical alerts for the sake of this discussion, and we can give it a description,
you can tell it what it is, so all critical alerts from iDRACs.
Just as an example, right? We have the option to enable the policy during the creation of
the policy, or you can uncheck that and it will disable the policy. That can be done at any time
in the alert policy screen. So we're going to click 'Next', so next is, we're presented with our
different types of categories. So in this case we have all of our built-in MIBs, so 'Applications',
'Dell Storage', iDRAC and so on, and then we have any imported MIBs. If you've imported,
or the customer has imported any MIBs from monitoring third-party devices.
In this particular case we're going to choose iDRAC,
and what you'll notice you'll notice that these six same categories exist in the iDRAC SNMP alert
section. That's because that's where the MIB files for OpenManage Enterprise are going to
read those alerts and tell you what they are. So here's where we have the option of choosing
the different types of alerts that we want this policy to act on.
So in this case we could choose 'System Health' and you know we could choose 'Battery Events',
we could choose 'iDRAC Service Module Events', you know, various events here.
So you could pick the events that you wanted, then you could click on 'Next'. The next
next screen here is where we're going to pick our target, in other words
when an alert comes in it's going to meet the category we previously chose and it's going to
be bound to a particular device. So in this case we can click here, and we can choose our devices.
Or if we have our devices in groups we could select groups and we could pick a group from
over here on the left hand side. So I have a couple of groups configured, you know,
I could choose the Texas group, and I could click 'OK'. So this is where we pick our targets.
Next is going to be our 'Date and Time' settings. So by default it's set for
from now until any time in the future, and it's set for every day of the week from
12 a.m to 12 a.m, so basically this is 24 hours a day. We can tell it to stop on a certain day,
you can tell it to admit this policy on certain times, like if you only want to do it from eight
to five you would choose 'Time Interval' and then you would choose eight to five.
You could choose the days of the week that you wanted it to apply to. In this particular case
I'm going to leave it for 24 hours a day and seven days a week. So then I click 'Next'.
This is where we're going to pick our severity. Since i called this 'Critical alerts for iDRACs'
what I'm going to do is, I'm going to choose just 'Critical' alert type. So I choose 'Critical',
then I click 'Next', and this is the action itself that the policy is going to take. You'll notice
here that we have 'Email' action, we can 'Ignore' we can send an 'SMS' message we can do 'Power
Control'. For example if an alert comes in of a certain type we could tell it to turn that device
off, we could tell it to power cycle that device, so the actions themselves can get pretty granular.
If the customer has a syslog enabled they can have the alerts forwarded to that syslog, or
if they want their traps forwarded to a different monitoring application they could simply use 'SNMP
Trap Forwarding'. Of course you can click on 'Enable' here and go to those screens and set up
SNMP trap forwarding or syslog. More commonly, for most customers I think they're going to use email.
In this case we would click email, you'll notice by default it's going to have the device name,
the device IP address in the subject. We're going to tell it where we want to send the, you know,
who we want to send the alert to. So we would type in an email address of who we want to receive that
alert. You can also change the from address as wel,l but by default it's set to 'admin@dell.com',
and then of course the message. This message is created based on the events that we set
in the previous panes. The category, the date and time, the severity of the event,
so basically we can choose to send an email, We could also add other controls if we wanted to,
um, to this, but for sake of this video we're just going to choose the email option.
Then we choose 'Next' and this gives us a summary of what we've created.
Basically it's saying that for all critical alerts from two different groups - that's
because I chose a 'Texas' hierarchy and underneath that was an 'Austin' group. Start date is today
and the timer interval is none, which means it's going to run all the time. So when I click finish
it's going to create that policy. Here on my alert policies page it's going to
name it what I named it. It's going to give it the description that I gave it
and it's going to allow you to enable or disable this policy.
So if for instance you wanted to turn this off for a period of time while you were
doing maintenance on your servers you could simply click on this, and it would turn this
policy off, so that when alerts did come in no emails would get sent. You could also at any time
just simply choose what else you may want it to do by clicking on these other categories here, and of
course anything that's required to be configured will pop up and you will have to configure it.
You can of course click on this and delete it at any time and edit it at any time.
So this particular alert policy is going to take critical alerts coming from the devices
of the type that I clicked on, and it's going to send an email
to me whenever an alert of that type comes in.
That pretty much covers alert policies. You can see that the customer has a lot of functionality
with this feature. I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope you have a good day. Thank you.