Binyamin Dissen writes: >If ALERTs are issued for normal events, they no longer have value >as ALERTs.
Ah, but who decides whether they're "normal" or not (and then what actions, if any, to take)? Any even moderately capable console that collects SNMP alerts also has the capability to triage and filter them according to evolving rules that define "normalcy." But if the alert never gets sent, then that filtering decision has already been made -- and *could* be made very badly. I tend to prefer reality and transparency. As I alluded to, it is possible to initiate additional alerts, such as: 09:55 Information: Application XYZ123 will have 30 minute planned outage starting in 5 minutes. 10:00 ALERT: Application XYZ123 is now offline. There's also the issue of testing at the console (and beyond). If the alerts never get sent, how do you know that the real ones work (or even go anywhere)? The above example is the equivalent of a fire drill, or alert rehearsal. I tend to prefer that. Your opinions and practices may vary. And there's yet another reason to avoid obfuscation: to measure SLAs accurately. If you're "secretly" downing applications, is that getting reflected in Service-Level Agreement measurements? Probably not, and perhaps with accurate knowledge you wouldn't be downing applications so often (or at all), and/or somebody else could make an informed decision whether or not to improve the SLA of particular application functions. Way too many IT folks think that SLAs are only about "unplanned" hard-stop system-level outages. The end-user perspective is much more about "can I get my work done?" and that really is the only correct perspective. "Can I get my work done?" is answered by looking at end-to-end service delivery, both planned and unplanned outages, missed response time goals (not just "down" outages), plus some other factors (e.g. "I can't log in!") Anyway, this discussion borders on the philosophical, but now you know my philosophy. :-) - - - - - Timothy Sipples Resident Enterprise Architect STG Value Creation & Complex Deals Team IBM Growth Markets (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
