Processing alerts

How nVision processes alerts

In most network monitoring products, you can only define conditions to indicate when an alert is to be raised, but do not get any information about how long such conditions have existed. Also, you usually cannot setup actions to be executed when such conditions are no longer valid. In nVision, every alert raised has a start time and an end time. When the event conditions are met, nVision raises an alert. Then the program continually checks if such conditions are still valid and ends the alert when they are not. It means that you can see the start and end times of every alert along with its duration.

When an alert is raised, then it is called an open alert and the status of such alert is set to <Open>. It remains open until the conditions that caused it to be raised are not longer true, or if the condition required to end this alert is not yet true. After all conditions required to end the alert are met, nVision ends it and changes its status to <Closed>. It indicates not only that the alert ended, but that the event (that triggered this alert) also ended.

How actions are executed

When an alert is raised, all actions related to it and scheduled for immediate execution are started. All other actions set as delayed will be executed only if the alert is still open (i.e. raised). When an alert ends, the action being executed also ends. You can also stop action execution for currently open alerts by setting Alert resolution.

Every alert is raised with the Resolution set to “New”. If you want to indicate that the alert notification has been successful and you are aware of the alert, then you must acknowledge the alert. To do that, just set alert resolution in nVision’s Event Log to “Acknowledged”. Similarly, when the problem causing an alert has been solved, then you can stop further actions by setting alert resolution to “Resolved”. In general, changing the alert resolution has the effect of stopping the execution of remaining actions.