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:
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.
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.
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.
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: