Monitor and Alert Systems III - Event Management

What is Event Management? Event Management can be defined as a set of functions that are applied to the alert system to identify those alerts associated with actual or potential service disruptions.

Event Manager (cont')

Alerts can arrive in different forms, as determined by the collectors and specific product implementations:-

• Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traps
• Alerts from passive and active collectors using vendor-specific products
• Alerts from other elements using vendor-specific products
• Alerts triggered by the arrival and transformation of an extensible markup language (XML) document
• Alerts generated by the management system itself
  

Event management can be handled either by a real-time event handler or a policy-based event handler.

• A real-time event handler can determine problem priorities by following pre-programmed rules, and it can automatically activate other management tools. This enables the administrator to design a sequence of steps using each tool in the appropriate steps.
• A policy-based event handler is more sophisticated, as it applies business rules to the operation of the system. The policy manager is an automated tool that identifies the service levels allocated to each end user and application, based on a set of predefined rules.

Long Term Operations

Sometimes, operations are considered on a long term, because their activation or completion within a short time interval is not critical, but can be associated with strategic changes to the service-delivery environment.

• Stress Test - Through a set real tests of the system, or of a representative environment in a test bed, a load test helps determine the actual non-linearity points and bottlenecks within a system. This benchmarking information validates capacity planning and helps set the appropriate threshold for detecting problems.
• Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning - Using information collected over a period of time, these predict infrastructure usage trends and the resulting resource needs. Such data can provide enough time to get resources in place before there is any service-quality impact.
• Deployment of New Service - To ensure that the new services will not destabilize the current systems and cause service degradation for existing service mix, we need to prudent with applications rolling out into production. A lot of commercial software in the market are designed for functional testing, but more are also encompassing regression testing. When changes are made, a regression test ensures that the changes made in the current system do not affect the functionality of the existing product.

At this moment of time, we shall not go in-depth into each of these items. Hopefully, through the understanding the basic concept of "Monitoring and Alerts", you can put them to effective use with your solutions offering to your clients, using various complementary, cost-effective products.