Aggregate alarms are a very powerful mechanism for being notified when cloud or application conditions are affecting multiple different locations or reducing alarm generation for what might be transient network or application conditions.
Aggregate alarms generate alerts or notifications only when the condition or threshold is affecting multiple CloudReady synthetic sensors.
Example
For example, let’s say you deploy 10 Email sensors across 10 different branch offices. You can configure an alarm for a condition across all 10 sensors and set the aggregate percentage to 30%. The alarm will only be generated when 4 or more sensors are exceeding the threshold or generating an error.
This can be very helpful for knowing when there is a centralized cloud service error condition or performance slow down.
Configure Aggregate Alarm
Aggregate alarms are not automatically configured as sensors are deployed. We recommend first removing the existing alarms for the condition that you will be configuring and then setting up the aggregate alarm.
- Go to the Alarm Dashboard
- Filter by sensor type. Aggregate alarms can only be configured for the same sensor type. Choose the sensor type and click Filter in the upper right of the alarm dashboard.
- Remove the existing alarm for the condition that you would like to configure across the sensors that you will be aggregating the alarm. Select the different alarms, click the Action dropdown, then Delete then click apply.
- Go to Add Alarm from the left-hand menu
- Select the sensor type from the drop down list
- Choose the element or condition that you will be alarming on. Configure the threshold, consecutive periods as you would for a normal alarm creation
- Choose the percentage of sensors that you want to “vote” on the alarm condition. If you have 10 sensors and you only want to know about a problem when half of them are breaching their threshold or experiencing the condition, then choose 50%
- Configure the recipient group, name and notes for the alarm
- Finally, in the bottom table, choose all of the sensors that the alarm will apply to. And click ‘Create Alarm’ at the bottom
This creates an aggregate alarm for an error condition or performance threshold applied to all of the sensors of a certain type. The alarm will only be triggered when the condition is breached across half or more of the sensors.