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This section includes the following topics:
- About the Precise bar
- Tasks common to most tabs
- About the Alerts user interface
- Components of Launching Alerts
- How Alerts works
- Where to get more information
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In a world where organizations rely on their information systems, avoiding problems that affect service to end-users is of prime concern. Proactive monitoring enables organizations to avoid such conditions by predicting potential problems before they occur. It focuses on identifying conditions that may lead to problems or that indicate that a problem may develop. This enables you to implement corrective solutions before problems surface.
Alerts, is an alerting product that helps you manage your system performance proactively. With Alerts, you can effectively detect availability and performance problems and react quickly to solve them.
Alerts samples data collected by other Precise products for the values of a set of metrics and compares these values with a predefined set of values, called thresholds. When the value of a metric exceeds the metric’s threshold value, Alerts alerts you through its user interface. It can even perform a defined corrective action.
A major cause of performance problems is imperfect application design. Therefore, monitoring the effectiveness of utilization and the efficient handling of data by the monitored servers are crucial to optimizing performance.
Alerts achieves this by focusing on the following:
- The resources and objects of the sampled devices
- The way your applications use those nodes to detect potential bottlenecks
Improved performance management
IT and operations staffs frequently ask questions like, “I cannot sit next to my console day and night looking for problems in the system. How can I find out immediately when something goes wrong?” and “How can I find out a performance problem exists before receiving complaints from our end-users?”
Using Alerts, IT and operations staffs can focus their valuable time on other activities. Alerts continuously and proactively monitors the health of critical applications.
When Alerts detects a performance problem, it will warn you before the problem affects the service to your end-users. Alerts can even draw your attention to performance problems that occur overnight or while you are away from your desk. To do so, Alerts sends you an email or an SNMP message. In addition, Alerts automatically logs all alerts to keep you fully up-to-date on system performance, no matter when a problem occurred.
When the threshold of a performance metric is exceeded, Alerts alerts you and triggers a user-defined automatic response. You can define thresholds and sampling frequencies for performance metrics using the Alerts user interface, without having to customize the code of your application.
Integrating with other Precise products
Precise consists of the following product suite:
- Alerts
- Report Manager
Alerts and Report Manager are used to support the Detect stage of the Precise methodology. They will alert you to performance problems early in their development and provide you warehouse-type information to support long-term profiling, trend and capacity analysis.
- Precise Custom Portal
The Precise Custom Portal is a lightweight, configurable portal application that provides access to various types of data from different applications. The Precise Custom Portal features a Web-based view. It is highly customizable and extensible, allowing you to build a dashboard for each user or each function within your organization. For example, you can build a dashboard for all the information that a system administrator or director of IT operations would need to constantly follow up on. This component is automatically installed as part of the Precise framework installation.
- Insight
Insight products monitor the response times of systems and break these times down into the various tiers and components. Insight products also provide tier-specific metrics to help understand the activities in each tier.
- Precise for Web
- Precise for SAP
- Precise for J2EE
- Precise for Microsoft .NET
- Precise for Oracle
- Precise for DB2
- Precise for SQL Server
- Precise for Sybase
These “Precise for” products provide a way to drill down into problematic tiers to identify and isolate root causes of performance problems. They can also assist in identifying and assessing solutions.
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- Alerts user interface elements
About the Precise bar
The Precise bar enables you to keep track of where you have been and provides various controls. The following table below describes the function of each of the toolbar buttons.
Table 2-1 Precise bar functions
| Icon | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
 | Back | During a work session, keeps track of where you have navigated to. The Back button enables you to navigate between previously visited views. The Back control displays your previous view. |
 | Forward | Enables you to navigate to the next view. This button is only enabled if you clicked Back or if you chose a history option. |
 | Stop | Stops a request for information from the server. |
 | Refresh | Updates the data currently displayed. |
 | Home | Navigates to the highest level entity, usually the instance or tier (all instances). The time frame settings remain the same. |
 | Send | Opens new email message in your email program with the link to the current application in context. |
 | Help | Opens the online help in context. |
 | Favorites | Enables you to add or remove favorites in your Favorites list. |
 | Settings | Lets you configure process availability settings. |
 | AdminPoint | Launches Precise AdminPoint. |
Tasks common to most tabs
The following tasks are commonly performed in most tabs:
- Switching to a different tab
- Determining which table columns to display
- Copying data to the clipboard
- Exporting to Precise Custom Portal
- Adding, viewing, and deleting Favorites
- Sending an email message
Switching to a different tab
You can easily switch between the different tabs using the Tab Selection bar. When you start your Precise product, the Dashboard tab opens by default. For other Precise products, another tab will open by default. The button of the selected tab is displayed in orange.
To select a tab
- Click a button on the Tab Selection bar to display information on the selected entity in a different tab.
Determining which table columns to display
Tables are used to display information about a set of related entities. It is possible to determine which columns to display in the area tables.
To determine which columns to display in a table
1. Click the Table icon on the upper right-hand side of a table and select Column Chooser.
2. In the Table columns dialog box, click the arrows to move the names of the columns that you want to display to the Visible box and the ones that you do not want to display to the Invisible box.
3. Click OK.
Copying data to the clipboard
At times you may want to save data displayed in the table area in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for further analysis. To copy data displayed in the table to the clipboard
1. Click the Table icon on the upper right-hand side of the table and select Copy to clipboard.
2. Open a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and choose Paste from the Edit menu.
Exporting to Precise Custom Portal
The Export to Precise Custom Portal Portlet feature enables you to export the view of the chosen table or graph and generate a portlet with that view in Precise Custom Portal, so that it will provide you with another way of monitoring your application.
Prerequisites
To be able to use this feature, you need to have the following rights in Precise:
• View permissions to all Tiers in the application.
If you do not have sufficient rights, you will get an error message when trying to execute this feature.
Exporting the information
You can either export a table view or a graph view.
| Info |
|---|
The name field has the following restrictions: maximum 100 characters. |
To export a table view
1. Click the Column Chooser icon.
2. Select Export to Precise Custom Portal Portlet.
3. Insert a name in the name field that clearly describes the table view.
4. Click OK.
To export a graph view
1. Right-click the graph.
2. Select Export to Precise Custom Portal Portlet.
3. Insert a name in the name field that clearly describes the graph view.
4. Click OK.
Adding, viewing, and deleting Favorites
The Favorites feature allows you to save a specific location in your application and to retrieve the same location later without having to navigate to it.
About the Favorites feature
The new Favorites feature includes the following options:
• Relative Time Frame – Saving relative time frame instead of static date. For example, saving the last 7 days will always display the last 7 days, depending on the day entered.
• One click to specific location – Once you open Precise by launching a saved Favorite item, you will not have to enter a login credential nor click the login button.
• IE Favorites support – Adding a new Favorite item in Precise will also add it to the IE Favorites menu.
• Auto Complete – The Favorites dialog includes a new combo box which supports Auto Complete.
• Auto Naming – The Favorites dialog generates item names based on the current location.
UI description
An Add/Delete Favorites option under the Favorites menu allows you to save the current location or delete an existing one.
To add a new Favorite location
1. On the Add/Delete Favorites dialog box, enter the name of the new Favorites entry.
2. Click Add. The dialog box is closed and the new Favorite is added to the list.
To view a Favorites location
1. On the Precise bar, click Favorites.
2. Select the Favorites location you want to view.
To delete an existing Favorite location
1. On the Add/Delete Favorites dialog box, select the Favorite location to be deleted.
2. Click Delete. The dialog box closes and the selected Favorite is deleted from the list.
NOTE The favorite address is displayed in the Address field and cannot be edited.
Sending an email message
You can send an email message to one or more recipients from the Precise toolbar. The default subject for the message will be “Link to a Precise application”.
The email will include a link to the Precise product in the current context (time frame and selected entries).
To send an email message
1. Click the email icon on the Precise toolbar. The default email program opens.
2. Fill in the required fields and click Send.
About the Alerts user interface
Alerts is a Web-based application. This means that you do not need to install any special software on your desktop to use Alerts. Instead, the application opens in a normal browser window.
Because Alerts is Web-enabled, you can access it from almost any location that is connected to the World Wide Web as long as you can access your Alerts FocalPoint server.
Although Alerts opens in a browser window it is important to understand that it is an application rather than a Web site. To perform activities within Alerts, you must use the Alerts controls, not the ones of your browser. You should not open information in a New Window, and you should not use the Back or Refresh hot-keys. Instead, use the Precise bar.
Launching Alerts
You launch Alerts from the Application screen or by selecting the Alerts tab on the Dashboard screen. From the Alerts screen, you can view alerts from Application level down to metrics level. Each of these alert levels helps you to isolate the causes of the alerts in the monitored application.
Red or yellow AppTier icon colors indicate a critical or near-critical alert condition. Green AppTier icon colors indicate normal conditions. For a desription of the metric status icons see “About the Metric status legend” on page 17.
Alerts can be generated for the following:
• Activity
• Service
• Trending
• Status
To launch Alerts from the Applications screen:
1. Click the required application from the Applications list.
2. In the Environmental map area, do one of the following:
a. Click Alerts.
b. Click a specific Tier, and from the pop-up menu select Alerts. The Alerts screen opens for the specified Tier tab.
The following figure shows an example of the information displayed when you open the Alerts tab for the first time.
Figure 2-1 Alerts Tab
Tab Selection
Alerts tree Precise bar
Metric Value area
Alerts user interface elements
The Alerts user interface consists of one main screen from which you can access the various alerts.
The Alerts tab display performance, availability, and management data on monitored instances in your application, in table format.
The left side of the main screen lists the Alerts in the following levels:
• Application level
• AppTier level.
• Instance level.
• Metric level.
The right side of the main screen provides details of the alerts according to the element selected in the tree on the left side of the screen as follows:
Application level All application alerts listing:
■ Alerts Summary
■ Alert Occurrences
AppTier level AppTier alerts listing:
■ Alerts Summary
■ Alert Occurrences
Instance level Instance alerts listing all alert instances
Metric level Details of the instances of the alert including the following details:
■ Metric description
■ Alert current and historical occurrences
■ Alert value
■ What to do next
About the Tab heading
The Tab heading provides information about the refresh status. It contains the following:
• Display of the date–and–time when the current tab was last refreshed.
• Auto-Refresh toggle button that also indicates whether it is On or Off. When the Auto-Refresh is On, the tab information is refreshed every one minute.
The Auto-Refresh is On by default, to display the most updated information, in the Cross-Tiers tab and Instances tab of the Tier tab.
The Auto-Refresh is Off by default in the Metrics tab of the Tier tab, because this tab is used for further investigation of specific metrics.
About the Metric status legend
The metric status legend contains icons that indicate the different alert statuses. The table below describes the status icons.
Table 2-2 Status icons
Icon Status Description
Key Metric Indicates that the metric is defined as a key metric, which is a metric that monitors an important performance aspect. You can define a metric as a key metric through the Thresholds tab of the metric properties.
Critical Indicates that the metric value exceeds the defined Critical threshold value.
Near-Critical Indicates that the metric value exceeds the defined Near-Critical threshold value.
Normal Indicates that the metric value falls in the defined acceptable range.
Down Time Indicates that the metric is not sampled due to Down Time definition of the metric's technology or when the sampled instance is not available. You can set the Down Time definition through AdminPoint. See the Precise Administration Guide.
Table 2-2 Status icons
Icon Status Description
Disabled Indicates that the metric is disabled, and therefore it does not sample or generate alerts. A metric is disabled in case the related Precise product is not installed, or the metric properties are set to stop sampling.
Not Sampled Indicates that the metric is not sampled since InformPoint was started, or errors occurred during the sampling process.
See “About editing metric properties” on page 24.
About the Alerts tree
The Alerts tree displays the highest alerts in the Tier level, thus simplifying the identification of exceeding metrics.
About Alert metrics
The right side of the Alerts tab displays the following information according to the element selected in the Tiers tree.
• All Application Alerts
• Application Level Metrics
• AppTier Alerts
• Instance Alerts
• Metric Details
All Application Alerts
The table below describes the details displayed in the All Application Alerts table that is displayed when you select the application in the Alerts tree.
Table 2-3 Alerts Summary - All Application Alerts
Column Description
Alert Indicates the highest alert severity level of the metric
Metric Indicates the metric name.
Last Alert Raised At Indicates the timestamp of the most recent sample.
Set Indicates the metric set.
AppTier Indicates the AppTier name of the metric.
When you select an entry in the Alerts Summary table, details of the instance of the alert are displayed in the Metric Alert Occurrences table.
The table below describes the details displayed in the Metric Occurrences table.
Table 2-4 Metric Alert Occurrences
Column Description
Instance Indicates the instance that is sampled by the metric.
Server Indicates the server name where the instance (that is sampled by the metric) is running.
Last Alert Raised At Indicates the timestamp of the most recent sample.
Set Indicates the metric set.
Table 2-4 Metric Alert Occurrences
Column Description
Alert History Appears only in the Metrics table. Indicates the number of normal, near-critical, and critical alerts that occurred during a pre-defined history period. The number of alerts does not include
user-triggered samples (Resamples) from that history period.
You can display the bar either in absolute values or relational values (percentage of the total alerts) by clicking the rectangle in the column header.
You can modify the history period through the Settings dialog box.
Application Level Metrics
Lists the Application level metrics for all applications. In version 9.5 the only Application level metric is Long Running transactions. The details shown on this page are the same as those show for Instance Alerts, see “Instance Alerts” on page 19.
AppTier Alerts
The table below describes the details displayed in the AppTier Alerts table that is displayed when you select an
AppTier in the Alerts tree
Table 2-5 AppTier Alerts
Column Description
Alert Indicates the highest alert severity level of the metric.
Metric Indicates the metric name.
Last Alert Raised At Indicates the timestamp of the most recent sample.
Set Indicates the metric set.
When you select an entry in the AppTier Alerts table details of the instance of the alert are displayed in the Metric Alert Occurrences table.
The table below describes the details displayed in the Metric Occurrences table.
Table 2-6 Metric Alert Occurrences
Column Description
Instance Indicates the instance that is sampled by the metric.
Server Indicates the server name where the instance (that is sampled by the metric) is running.
Last Alert Raised At Indicates the timestamp of the most recent sample.
Set Indicates the metric set.
Alert History Indicates the samples taken organized by time.
Instance Alerts
The table below describes the details displayed in the Instance Alerts table that is displayed when you select an instance in the Alerts tree.
Table 2-7 Instance Alerts
Column Description
Alert Indicates the highest alert severity level of the metric.
Metric Indicates the metric name.
Table 2-7 Instance Alerts
Column Description
Last Alert Raised At Indicates the timestamp of the most recent sample.
Set Indicates the metric set.
Alert History Indicates the samples taken organized by time.
When you select an entry in the Instance Alerts table details of the instance of the alert are displayed in the Metric Details table (see Metric Details).
Metric Details
The table below describes the details that displayed when you select a metric in the Alerts tree or in the Instance Alerts table (see Instance Alerts).
Table 2-8 Metric Details
Column Description
Metric Description Detailed description of the metric.
Alert Current and Historical
Occurrences Bar graphic indicating current and historical occurrences.
Alert Value Displays a sample value for the alert.
What To Do Next Suggests various option as a next step.
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Alerts uses a distributed architecture that enables you to monitor performance in your entire application from a single control point.
The figure below illustrates the Alerts architecture.
Figure 1-1 Alerts typical architecture
Alerts consists of the following components:
- Precise FocalPoint and a Web server that communicates with the client’s browser.
- One Alerts FocalPoint that is installed on a system server (or a dedicated server).
- InformPoint agents that are installed on one or more servers in your application. These InformPoint agents sample information from all Precise products (only one agent installation is required for each server).
- One InformPoint agent that is automatically installed on the server where Alerts FocalPoint is installed. This InformPoint agent samples the Status set metrics, and is also available for sampling metrics of Precise products. (If this InformPoint agent is uninstalled, the metrics of the Status set metrics will not be available.) See “Status set” on page 27.
- One or more Internet Explorer windows may be activated on the client-side. Working with Alerts, you may open as many clients as you want.
Precise FocalPoint
Precise FocalPoint is the main FocalPoint of all Precise suite products. FocalPoint is a Precise infrastructure component that communicates with its own distributed agents, each of which gathers information from the other Precise agents on a Tier and stores it locally.
Alerts FocalPoint
Alerts FocalPoint collects data from all InformPoint agents, stores it, and then processes it according to user requests. By processing data in its FocalPoint, Alerts keeps the consumption of your system’s resources at a minimum.
The Alerts FocalPoint software consists of the following components:
- PMDB
- Alerts FocalPoint Processes
PMDB
Alerts FocalPoint stores the sampled data, which is collected by the Alerts agents, in the PMDB. In addition, it stores all Alerts configuration data.
Alerts FocalPoint processes
The Alerts FocalPoint processes perform the following functions:
- Processing sampled data retrieved by InformPoint agents from Precise products. FocalPoint writes the data it receives into the PMDB and, if required, generates actions.
- Communicating with the user interface. Requests issued by users are sent using the user interface to Alerts FocalPoint. The Alerts FocalPoint processes obtain relevant data from either the PMDB or the InformPoint agents, process the data, and send it back to the user by using the user interface.
- Maintaining the PMDB by periodically purging old data.
- Generating pre-defined actions such as:
- Sending email messages.
- Displaying popup messages on any open Alerts user interface.
- Running a program on the FocalPoint server and on the servers where the instance is running.
- Sending SNMP traps to any SNMP-based management system.
When SNMP is enabled, then Alerts FocalPoint can receive SNMP Get and Set requests, to read or update the PMDB accordingly.
InformPoint agents
The InformPoint agents collect performance data in your system by running pre-defined (generic) metrics and user-defined metrics (customized metrics).
The InformPoint agents process the retrieved data and report to the Alerts FocalPoint. Alerts FocalPoint then correlates this information to provide the current status of the different instances’ performance in your application and to alert you to any problematic changes.
The other agents of Precise products collect and process the performance data of the monitored instance and send it to the appropriate FocalPoint of the Precise product. InformPoint, which is installed on the same server as the product's FocalPoint, requests data for all the instances monitored by that product directly from the product's FocalPoint.
Customized Metrics are designed to be executed on the instance server. An InformPoint agent must only be installed on the sampled instance server (using the Agent Installer) if one or more customized metrics for sampling the instance will be defined. For sampling all other Precise product metrics, InformPoint will be installed automatically on the same server of the Precise product FocalPoint server as part of the Precise product FocalPoint installation. InformPoint should not be installed manually using the Server List page (the third stage in the Precise Agent Installer process) if no customized metrics are going to be defined for sampling instances on this server.
The figure below illustrates the typical architecture of InformPoint agents.
Figure 1-2 InformPoint agents
In this example, Alerts monitors a Precise for SQL Server installation. The Precise for SQL Server installation includes two instances on different servers, SQSRV1 and SQSRV2. To enable Alerts to monitor the Precise for SQL Server
product, an InformPoint agent is installed on the Precise for SQL Server FocalPoint (Server 1). Alerts InformPoint collects the alerts data from the Precise FocalPoint product.
See “Creating customized metrics” on page 25.
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Alerts proactively monitors the performance in your application from a centralized location called Alerts FocalPoint. Alerts agents—called InformPoints—query all Precise products. The InformPoints retrieve performance data collected by the Precise products, analyze it, and generate alerts if the predefined thresholds are exceeded.
These alerts are then sent to Alerts FocalPoint, which processes the information, saves it in a local database, and activates any action that is defined for the specific alert.
Once a metric is sampled, the value of the metric is compared to a predefined set of values called thresholds. When the value of the metric exceeds one of the metric’s threshold values, an alert is generated and the status of the metric is changed to near-critical or critical.
Metrics are grouped into metric sets. The status of the metric set is the overall status of its metrics. You can monitor the status of metric sets and metrics through the Alerts tab.
To proactively monitor your application, you can define actions that Alerts will automatically perform if it detects a warning or critical status for a specific metric. For example, you can configure Alerts to send an email message, display a pop-up message, run a program, send SNMP traps, or send MOM alerts to the MOM Server.
You can change the default properties of a metric to suit the special requirements of your application. For example, you can change the near-critical and critical thresholds and limit information to be included.
Another important aspect of monitoring is a look at the overall activity to identify current performance problems and compare the load and service of different components.
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More information on Precise, its products, technical notes, and so on, can be found in the Release Notes document for this version.
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