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Isis provides a mechanism for tracking in real-time the attributes of a production system and then applying rules against those attributes to determine when they are operating outside of defined boundaries. For example if you are monitoring a WebLogic application, then you might like to know if that application server is running out of available heap space. You might also want to be emailed as soon as this action occurs, so that you can deal with the issue promptly. This is the functionality that is provided by the Isis rules and actions.

An Isis rule is applied against one or more attributes that are being monitored by Isis. An action is something that can take place when a rule is found to have occurred. So in the example above, we would use a rule to monitor if heap usage was getting low and an action to send an email when this occurred.

Creating A New Isis Rule

Creating a new rule in Isis is a straight forward task that simply requires you to follow a few steps in the Isis rule Wizard. To start the wizard simply click on the Create New IBP Rule icon on the menu to bring up the screen shown below.



From here you can see all of the currently configured rules and also enable / disable or delete these rules. Enabling and disabling rules is particularly useful if you want to switch one or more rules off for a period of time while to do regular maintenance etc. To enable, disable or delete one or more rules simply select the rule or rules that you require and click the enable, disable or delete buttons. Rules that are currently enable are shown with a green light showing, rules that are disabled have a red light.

To create a new rule, click the Create button and the following dialog will appear.

Select the application that you wish to apply this rule to, you can only select one application per rule. Once you have selected the application, press the Next button and the following screen (or similar) will appear.

Isis will now show you a list of all of the rules that are applicable for this type of application. Select the rule that you are interested in and then click the Next button. Once you press the Next button a screen similar to the following will appear.

Each rule that you select can only be applied to a number of sources that you are currently monitoring. For example there would be no point in applying a rule that related to a WebLogic heap size to a Tuxedo server. Select the sources that you wish to monitor with this rule. Note that you can monitor a maximum of ten sources with a single rule. Once you have selected the sources that you wish to monitor, press the Next button and the following screen (or similar) will appear.

Depending on what rule you have selected you will now need to provide one or more values for that rule. For example when monitoring the heap usage, Isis needs to know what you consider to be the level that the alert should fire at (in this case 15). Each rule requires a name and the name of the rule must be unique. Once you have provided the configuration information for your rule press the Next button and the following screen (or similar) will appear.

Once your rule has been configured you can decide if you want to take an action on the firing of the rule. You might choose to take ** No Action For Rule **, which means that when the rule fires it will simply be logged, or you might choose to take an Action. Select on of the options from the list, if you do decided to select an action, the the following screen will appear, if you decide not to take an action then your rule will be configured and the wizard will exit.

Each action has a number of parameters that can be passed to it as part of the process of running the action. For example the email action needs to know where it should send the email and what the email server is etc. Simply fill out the details as appropriate. You may notice a number of tags in the various parameters, which can be identified by the fact that they are enclosed in square brackets. A tag is a standard field in Isis that will be replaced with a value from the rule when the action executes. For more information of the standard tags is outlined below.

If you have previously configured this action, then the name of that rule will appear in the templates pull down list at the top of this form. By selected that rule, all the values of the action will be pre-populated with the values of the action configured for that rule.

Once you have filled out the values then hit the next button to continue.

Rules have multiple states that they can fire, some rules (such as the one above) only have a single state (Error), others have multiple states. Select the states that you wish your action to fire on and then press the finish button to finish configuring the rule.

Monitoring Rules

Once a rule has been configured it can be monitored in the IBP Rules Dashboard, to open the dash board click on the Rules Dashboard icon in the menu on the left. Note the various tabs at the bottom of the dashboard, by clicking on these tabs you have bring up the configuration menus for the dashboard (or console), Log and Mail settings.

Isis Rule Tags

Isis provides a number of standard tags that can be used to pass values between rules and actions. The following values can be passed in as parameters when configuring a rule.