Practical Service Level Management: Delivering High-Quality Web-Based Services

Basic Event Management Functions: Reducing the Noise and Boosting the Signal

Event management must deal with a flood of alerts and select those that actually matter. A dynamic environment with multiple instrumentation points generates different views of the same behaviors. As an example, consider a case where a key database server fails. The database server may have sent an alarm before it crashed, but there is no guarantee that it did so. Active collectors (which were discussed in Chapter 4), or probes, also report a failure after they execute the next virtual transaction against that server.

The active measurements offer an administrator the assurance of independently detecting the problem; however, this approach also generates multiple reports ...