B Overview of Notification in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control

Understanding Events, Incidents, and Incident Rulesets

In the earlier releases of Enterprise Manager, the notification system operated using Notification Rules, which were a set of predetermined rules or conditions indicating when a notification had to be sent and what actions had to be taken.

In Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, this concept of Notification Rules has been enhanced and subsumed into a much larger and newer concept called Incident Rulesets.

Before discussing Incident Rulesets, understand the concept of Events and Incidents.

• Events are significant and interesting occurrences in your managed environment. Target availability status changes, metric alerts, and status changes of job executions are examples of the types of events that Enterprise Manager detects. Users may be interested in getting notified about these events and responding accordingly to resolve the underlying issues. By formalizing the concept of events, Enterprise Manager extends the monitoring functionality to additional occurrences in the enterprise that might be of interest, such as metric evaluation errors or compliance standard violations.

• Incidents are a subset of related events that may indicate potential or actual disruption to the dependent IT services, and require attention from an administrator or a team. Incidents can be created for such events, which can then be assigned to an administrator and tracked to completion.

Incident Ruleset is a set of rules that typically operate on a set of targets, and include individual rules to notify appropriate personnel and take appropriate action on events, incidents, and problems.

A rule can operate on events to send notifications as well as create incidents. It can also operate on specific incidents, so you can auto-assign, prioritize, or even escalate them via time-based conditions.

Incident Rulesets are further classified into enterprise and private rulesets.

• Enterprise Rulesets are used to automate and enforce enterprise level behavior such as notifying one or more users, sending notifications using advanced notification methods, raising tickets in external ticketing systems, creating and updating incidents. Only administrators with the Create Enterprise Ruleset privilege can create these rulesets.

• Private Rulesets are useful for administrators to e-mail themselves about specific changes. They can be created by any administrator and can only be used to send e-mails to the owner of the ruleset.

All Incident Rulesets can be edited by the owner of the ruleset and any super administrator. In addition, the owners can designate other users as coauthors of Enterprise Rulesets. This enables shared management of the ruleset.

Accessing Incident Rulesets

To view all Incident Rulesets, in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, from the Setup menu, click Incidents, and then, select Incident Rules. Figure B-1 shows the Incident Ruleset page:

Figure B-1 Viewing Incident Rulesets

Migrating Notification Rules to Incident Rulesets

During upgrade, all Notification Rules created in the earlier release of Enterprise Manager are automatically migrated to corresponding Incident Rulesets that act on the targets originally defined in the Notification Rule.

The following Notification Rules are migrated to Enterprise Rulesets:

• Notification Rules that send e-mails to owners who have not created the rules

• Notification Rules that invoke an advanced notification method

The following Notification Rules are migrated to Private Rulesets:

• Notification Rules that have no actions.

• Notification Rules that send e-mails to owners who have created the rules.

Each of the three possible criteria—availability, metrics, jobs—defined in an old Notification Rule are migrated to three individual rules that operate on appropriate events. The action defined at the Notification Rule level is copied over to each of these rules.

One exception is that the concept of Policy Violations is being withdrawn in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, and therefore, all policy-specific criteria are ignored and none of the rules that solely operate on policies are migrated.

The owners of Notification Rules, which were created in the earlier release of Enterprise Manager, become the owners of the corresponding Incident Rulesets in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. These owners can edit the Enterprise Rulesets and Private Rulesets. In addition, all administrators can create Private Rulesets to send e-mails to themselves.

Going forward, the super administrators should determine which administrators can create Enterprise Rulesets by granting the Create Enterprise Ruleset resource privilege.

Working with Notification Methods and Actions

Notification methods and actions defined in earlier releases of Enterprise Manager will continue to work in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, and the input to these original notification methods are backward compatible in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. So if you had an OS command or a PL/SQL notification method that operated on metric alerts, you will continue to receive the same input after upgrade. However, all new notification methods you create in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control will accept input based on the new event and incident model.