Controlling the Severity of Containers

Assign Action Profile

The Severity tab enables you to assign an action profile to a service container. The action profile is triggered when the service container changes to a specified severity status. See Action Profiles for more information.

Severity Determined by

The severity status of a container can be one of four values:

• OK
• Unknown
• Warning
• Critical.

The severity status is determined using one of the following methods:

• Devices or Test Severity - Setting the severity equal to the worst severity of any of the components in a container. This is the default method.

  Rule-based - Calculating the severity of the container. The rule is based on the percentage of devices or tests that have reached a selected severity value. Traverse requires that you specify rules from "worst to best". Select the worst condition (Critical) in the first Device/Test severity drop-down menu, followed by Warning in the second drop-down menu, and then OK in the last drop-down menu. The rule-based approach is most useful for redundant or clustered devices, such as behind a load balancer.

Severity Affected by Message Events

• Yes, Use SNMP Trap, Syslog, Windows Events - If checked, includes messages events when calculating the percentage of devices or tests that have reached a selected severity value.

  

Example

Assume an e-commerce service with a cluster of web servers in the front, connected via two redundant routers to a remote location housing a database. Since containers support nesting, you can model the above using multiple nested containers such as:

• a container of all your web servers with a rule-based severity.
• another container of the redundant networks paths between the front end web server farm and the back end database.
• a top level container (call it eCommerce) which has the above two containers as well as the backed database in it, with the default severity rule.

If any of the three components in the eCommerce container goes into a non-OK condition, the top level eCommerce container will also change its state in real time.