What Are Rules And Actions?
Creating A New Isis Rule
Monitoring Rules
Isis Rule Tags
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 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 click on the link here.
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.
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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.
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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.
| [RULING:MESSAGE] |
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What is the message that has been returned from the
rule.
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| [RULING:ERRORLEVEL] |
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What error level did the rule fire at? Valid error levels
are;
OK = 0
FALSE = 1
TRUE = 2
INFORMATION = 3
WARNING = 4
ERROR = 5
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| [RULING:TIME] |
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What time did the error occur
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| [APP:ID] |
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What is the ID for this application? The ID is the identified
that you provided Isis when first creating the application
and is also what appears in the tag on the main monitoring
screen for this application.
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| [APP:ADDRESS] |
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What is the IP address that the application is running
on.
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| [RULE:CURRENTVALUE] |
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What is the current value of the statistic that we are
monitoring.
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| [RULE:VALUE1] |
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If we are comparing the current value to other values
(for example to look at ranges of values) then what is
the first value that we are comparing against?
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| [RULE:VALUE2] |
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What is the second value that we are comparing against?
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| [RULE:COMPVALUE] |
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If we are comparing the current value against another
statistic, then what was its value.
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