Alerts and State
State monitoring uses the MOM alert infrastructure to modify state for an instance of a component. To modify state for a component, an alert must be raised. It is not possible to set state without the use of an alert. As is explained in detail later in this guide, the severity of the alert determines how state is displayed to the user. State monitoring displays the health of the roles and sub group roles by using icons, which represent the health state of a role (based on rolled up health state). To set or modify state, an alert must be raised for each component. Each state role color maps to a particular alert severity as outlined in Table 6.1.
Table 6.1 Severity Levels
Alert Severity |
State Color |
|---|---|
Security Issue |
Red |
Service Unavailable |
Red |
Critical Error |
Red |
Error |
Yellow |
Warning |
Yellow |
Information |
Green |
Success |
Green |
Microsoft recommends that the following health indicators be used to set state roles:
Red - Immediate user intervention required. This is a typical high-priority MOM alert, which requires the user to intervene in order for the application to start working and perform effectively.
Yellow - The application or role is performing poorly, or components of the application might stop working, if the user does not intervene. Yellow should also be used when health cannot be determined for a component. For example, because the health of a component cannot be set when a dependent component is unavailable, health monitoring scripts or rules cannot execute.
Green - The application or role is healthy, and no user action is required.
Health State
The health of an application component can often span all three alert states from a single rule. For example, a particular performance threshold can indicate healthy performance, overloaded or excessive performance, which makes a role unavailable. Another example of health indicators that may span all health states is the space remaining in a drive or database, which, based on a defined threshold, may span the range of health for each instance.
Problem State
State alerts use a "problem state" value which shows the current state of an alert raised for state monitoring (traditional non-state based alerts use the "investigate" value for the problem state field). The following values are possible for problem state:
Active - A new (red- or yellow-based) state alert that is active. For example, a service has stopped and state has been set red.
Inactive - An inactive (red- or yellow-based) state alert where the problem has been resolved, as determined by state monitoring. For example, a service has started running and state shows green for the alert. In this case, the original alert will still be visible in the Operations console; however, the problem state will show "Inactive."
Investigate - Used for non-state based rules.