Disabling Certain Notification Events in vROps Using Policies

I received an interesting request from one of our customers today. He wanted to disable certain notifications from the Blue Medora NetApp Storage Management Pack. In other words, he wanted to receive all notifications, but drop certain notifications containing specific verbiage. The process was a bit more involved than I thought it would be, since the Notification Event alert is attached to “All Objects” and could not be edited. Initially I figured I could just add a Symptom to that alert that said something like… ” And does not contain x”. Since that isn’t an option, below is the workaround.

In this example, we want to exclude a notification event from NetApp which is showing up for NetApp Volumes with a name of “Notification Event – Sis Status Idle”. First step is to create a policy for NetApp Volumes which disables the generic “Notification Event” that is assigned to all objects:

1. Log in to vRealize Operations as an administrator
2. Navigate to Administration -> Policies
3. Click on the “Policy Library” tab.
4. Click on the “Add New Policy” button (the green plus sign).
5. Enter a name for this policy. I recommend you come up with some sort of naming standard so you can easily organize your policies. I’m going to call this one “NetApp Volume – Disable Events”. (See below)
   
6. Next, let’s disable the Notification Events by first selecting “Alert/Symptom Definitions”
7. Using the filter, find the Alert named “Notification event”
8. In the “Status” column, select the disabled local option to disable this Alert.
   

Now we have a new policy created with notification events Alerts disabled. The next step is to create a group of resources for which we would like to apply this policy – in this case, NetApp Volumes.

1. Navigate to Environment
2. Click on Custom Groups
3. Click on the New Group button
4. For the name, we’ll just call this “NetApp Volumes”
5. For the Group Type, let’s select Environment
6. For the Policy, we’ll select the policy we just created, which excludes the Notification Event alerts.
7. Next, we put in the criteria to select the volumes we want included.
8. Make sure to check the “Keep group membership up to date” so that this group is updated as new NetApp Volumes are created.
   

So now we have a policy created, which disables the Notification Event alerts, and we’ve created a group of resources to apply that policy to. Now we want to create a new Alert which captures just the subset of Notification Events for NetApp Volumes.

1. Click on the Content button
2. Select Symptom Definitions
3. Select Message Event Symptom Definitions
4. Click on the Add button
5. Select “NetApp Volume” for Base Object Type
6. Select the “Notification” event type
7. Enter a friendly name for this symptom – “NetApp Notification Event”
8. Set the criticality to Event Based
9. Set the criteria to a wildcard matching the expression “(?s).*” This will pick up all notification events.
   

Next, let’s create a symptom which contains the criteria for the event we want to exclude. Follow the same steps as previous, but this time we’ll enter the criteria of “Equals” with the string we want to exclude.

So now we have two symptoms – one that collects all alerts for NetApp Volumes, and another symptom which excludes the notification event we don’t care about. Next step is to create an alert that ties together both of these symptoms.

1. Select Alert Definitions, under Content
2. Click on the Add button.
3. Enter a name for this Notification Event Alert
   
4. Select the Object Type you would like to create an alert for. In this case, we are using NetApp Volume.
   
5. Set the Impact, Criticality, Alert Type and Subtype. I recommend leaving the Wait Cycle and Cancel Cycle at 1, as you want this alert to trigger right away when you receive an alert.
   
6. Add the two new Symptoms we just created.
7. Next to the Symptom you would like to exclude, click on the circle to the left of the Symptom name in the Alert. This will toggle this symptom to exclude it from the alert.
   

As you can see, vRealize Operations Policies are a powerful way to manage thresholds, alerts, and capacity planning. In this blog we looked at how Policies can be used to define which alerts are assigned to specific objects. For more insight into how Policies can be used, please see these other great blogs:

• Using vRealize Operations Policies to Disable Alerts on Certain Objects
• Maintenance Mode in vRealize Operations
• Customizing vROps: Decide Which Metrics to Collect
• Customizing vROps – Creating Relationships and Changing Collection Intervals
• Getting More Out of vRealize Operations 6.x: Optimizing Your Existing Capacity
• vRealize Operations Policies Demystified: Definitions