New Hawkular blog post from noreply(a)hawkular.org (Edgar Hernández):
http://ift.tt/2ygxRgx
Hawkular project includes an alerting module that can be used to send notifications when
certain conditions are met. The alerting module is bundled in Hawkular Middleware Manager
(aka. Hawkular Services)
ManageIQ also has alerting capabilities and Hawkular Middleware Manager integrates to it.
Once Hawkular is added as a provider, ManageIQ alerting features can be used to monitor
servers managed by Hawkular.
ManageIQ alerting terminology
In ManageIQ, two terms are used:
Alert
Defines the which type of infrastructure item should be monitored, the conditions and the
actions to take when the conditions are met.
Alert profile
It is a relation between a set of alerts and a set of infrastructure items. The set of
alerts in the profile will all be applied to the set of infrastructure items. If any of
the infrastructure items met the conditions in one of the alerts, the actions of the alert
will run.
ManageIQ has support for several types of infrastructure items, but Hawkular Middleware
Manager supports only a subset of them. Middleware servers are an example of
infrastructure items that are supported by Hawkular.
Hawkular alerting terminology
Hawkular’s alerting module has several kinds of objects (and terms). The two objects that
are relevant from a ManageIQ perspective are:
Group trigger
Defines the set of conditions that should be met to fire an alert or an event. A group
trigger is a template and no alert nor events will be fired until a member is added to
it.
Group member
It’s an association of a group trigger with the actual data to be evaluated. Internally to
Hawkular, group members are managed instances of group triggers. Changes to the group
trigger are pushed down to the members.
Currently, ManageIQ creates group triggers that raise events (not alerts) and polls
Hawkular to catch the events and run configured actions, if needed.
Terminology relationships
When a user creates a ManageIQ alert, a Hawkular group trigger is created in the
background. From then, any changes to the ManageIQ alert are replicated to the associated
Hawkular group trigger until the alert is deleted, which causes the group trigger to also
be deleted.
While ManageIQ alerts have a direct relation with Hawkular group triggers, ManageIQ alert
profiles are a little bit more complicated. For each alert in a ManageIQ profile, one
Hawkular group member is created for each infrastructure item in the profile.
This means that nothing is created in Hawkular if:
The alert profile is empty (has no alerts nor infrastructure items)
The alert profile has alerts but has no infrastructure items
The alert profile has infrastructure items but has no alerts
If a ManageIQ alert profile has one alert and has assigned multiple infrastructure items,
then the relevant Hawkular group trigger will have as many members as infrastructure items
are in the ManageIQ alert profile.
If a ManageIQ alert profile has multiple alerts and has assigned only one infrastructure
item, then each Hawkular group trigger will have one member.
With these two examples, you should be able to guess what will happen if the ManageIQ
alert profile has a set of alerts and a set of infrastructure items.
Creating ManageIQ alerts
Alerts are created by navigating to Control > Explorer > Alerts. In the
alerts tree, select the All alerts folder. This will enable the Add a New Alert option
under the Configuration button.
In the form to create/edit an alert, be sure to select Middleware server in the Based On
field. Currently, this is the only infrastructure item supported by Hawkular. If you
choose something else, the alert won’t be managed by Hawkular. All other options can be
filled as desired.
When the alert is created, it will be available in the control explorer and will be
available to be included in an alert profile. In the background, a Hawkular group trigger
is also created.
Creating an alert profile
Alert profiles are created by navigating to Control > Explorer > Alert
Profiles. In the alerts tree, select the Middleware server Alert Profiles item. This will
enable the Add a Middleware Server Alert Profile option under the Configuration button.
In the form to create/edit an alert profile, write a description and select the desired
alerts to evaluate. At least, one alert is required to be able to create the alert
profile.
When the alert profile is created, it will be available in the control explorer which will
also list the alerts contained in the profile. Nothing will be created in Hawkular because
when the profile is created it is still not assigned to middleware servers.
Assigning middleware servers to an alert profile
To assign middleware servers to an alert profile, select the desired profile in the
control explorer. In the toolbar, use the Edit assignments for this Alert Profile options
under the Configuration button.
This will show the assignments page. An alert profile can be assigned to specific
middleware servers or to all inventoried middleware servers (The Enterprise).
Once you have chosen the desired middleware servers (or the enterprise) and changes are
saved, the view page of the alert will be displayed again.
In the background, Hawkular group members will be created to make effective the
configuration and alerts should start triggering.
Viewing alerts in the timeline
The timeline of ManageIQ Hawkular provider will log events if the configuration of an
alert is enabled to show timeline events. Hawkular’s provider timeline can be accessed
through the summary page of the provider, under the Monitoring menu:
If the alert has enabled the standard Show on Timeline configuration, the options to query
the events are:
Event type: Management Events
Category: Alarm/Status Change/Errors
Conclusion
ManageIQ and Hawkular, albeit being two independent projects, they can be connected
together to complement each other features. In this post is discussed how the alerting
integration works and how to configure a basic alert.
At the time of writing, ManageIQ supports only Middleware Servers as targets and, also,
only a limited set of metrics is available to configure alerts. There is ongoing work to
provide a wider range of metrics and this is expected to be available in following
versions.
from Hawkular Blog