Cisco Systems OL-10041-01 User Manual
Using Notifications
Cisco Unified Operations Manager (Operations Manager) generates alerts in response to events that
occur in the IP Telephony environment and the IP fabric. You can view alerts on Operations Manager
dashboards, such as the Alerts and Events display. In addition, you can configure notifications to forward
information about alerts and events to SNMP trap daemons on other hosts, syslog daemons, and users.
The following topics explain notifications concepts and provide procedures for managing notifications:
• Understanding Notifications, page 14-1
• Configuring Event Sets, page 14-4
• Configuring Notifications, page 14-7
• Customizing Events, page 14-19
Understanding Notifications
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This topic describes how Operations Manager determines when to send a notification and introduces the
concepts that you need to be familiar with to configure notifications.
Note Notifications monitor events on device roles, not on device components. For a list of supported events
and the device roles on which they can occur, see Appendix D, “Events Processed.”
What Causes Operations Manager to Send Notifications?
For each alert or event, Operations Manager compares the event, devices, severity, and state against the
configured notification groups and sends a notification when there is a match. Matches can be
determined by user-configured event sets and notification criteria. (The procedure for configuring
notification criteria is described in Configuring Notifications, page 14-7.)
Operations Manager assigns one severity to each alert or event and changes the state of an alert or event
over time, responding to user input and changes on the device. Table 14-1 on page 14-2 lists values for
severity and explains how the state of an alert or event changes over time.
Note You can change event names to names that are more meaningful to you. You can also change the event
severity sent in notifications from the Operations Manager default value to a user-defined value. See
Customizing Events, page 14-19.
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Understanding Notifications
Table 14-1 Alert and Event Severity and Status
Operations Manager categorizes alerts and events by severity and status…
Severity
Status
What Are Notification Groups?
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Critical
Warn in g
Informational
Active—The alert or event is live.
Acknowledged—A user has manually acknowledged the alert. A user can
acknowledge only active alerts or events.
Cleared—The alert or event is no longer active.
Note Alerts or events that have been cleared either expire or, if
associated with a suspended device, remain in Operations
Manager until a user resumes or deletes the device.
A notification group is a user-defined set of rules for generating and sending notifications. A notification
group includes:
• Notification criterion—A named set of reasons to generate a notification.
• Notification type—The type of notification to send: SNMP trap, e-mail, and syslog.
• Notification recipients—Hostnames and ports for system that listen for SNMP traps or syslog
messages; or e-mail addresses.
• Daily subscription activity period—The hours during which Operations Manager should use this
subscription while monitoring the alerts and events for which to send notifications.
What Are Notification Criteria?
Notification criteria define what you want to monitor for the purpose of sending notifications. A
notification criterion is a user-defined, named set of devices or phones, and alerts and events of a
particular severity and status. You must specify notification criteria to configure a notification group.
Operations Manager supports two types of notification criteria:
• Device-Based Criteria—Includes the following:
–
Devices—The devices or device groups that you want to monitor.
–
Event sets—(Optional). One or more groups of events that you want to monitor. See How Can
I Limit Notifications to Those for Specific Events?, page 14-4.
–
Alert severity and status—One or more alert severity levels and status.
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–
Event severity and status—One or more event severity levels and status.
Note You can also customize the names and severity of the device-based events displayed by
Notifications. See Customizing Events, page 14-19.
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• Service Quality-Based Criteria—Includes the following:
For additional information, please see the following topics:
• Configuring Event Sets, page 14-4
• Configuring Notifications, page 14-7
Understanding Notifications
–
Phones, endpoints, or probes—Phones, call endpoints, or probes that you want to monitor.
–
Alert severity and status—One or more alert severity levels and status.
–
Event severity and status—One or more event severity levels and status.
Note You cannot customize the names and severity of the Service Quality-based events
displayed by Notifications.
Service Quality-based criteria are useful when you have purchased a license for Service Monitor
and configured Operations Manager as a trap receiver on Service Monitor. Service
Quality-based criteria do not include events sets.
What Types of Notifications Can I Send?
Operations Manager provides three types of notification: SNMP trap, e-mail, and syslog. When you
configure a notification group, you specify one or more types of notification to send and you must also
specify recipients for each type of notification.
SNMP Trap Notifications
Operations Manager generates traps with information about the alert and the events that caused it.
CISCO-EPM-NOTIFICATION-MIB defines the trap message format. For more information, see
Appendix C, “Notification MIB.”
Note Using SNMP trap notification is different from forwarding raw traps to another server before they have
been processed by Operations Manager. For information about the raw traps that Operations Manager
can forward, see Appendix B, “Pass-Through SNMP Unidentified Traps.”
E-Mail Notifications
Operations Manager generates e-mail messages containing information about the alert and the events
that caused it. CISCO-EPM-NOTIFICATION-MIB defines the message, which is included in the e-mail
in text format. When you create an e-mail subscription, you can choose whether to include the subject
line only or the complete e-mail message.
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Configuring Event Sets
Syslog Notifications
Operations Manager generates syslog messages that can be forwarded to syslog daemons on remote
systems.
Note Syslog messages cannot exceed 1024 bytes. If the syslog message exceeds this limit, it will be truncated
to 1024 bytes.
Which Systems and Users Can I Notify?
When you configure a notification group, you must specify recipients for each type of notification:
• SNMP trap—Send SNMP traps to a port number on which the host can receive traps. Operations
Manager defaults to sending SNMP traps to the port 162. However, you can specify a different port.
• E-Mail—Send e-mail to one or more addresses.
• Syslog—Send syslog messages to a remote system on which the syslog daemon is configured to
listen on a specified port. Operations Manager defaults to sending syslog messages to port 514.
However, you can specify a different port.
Chapter 14 Using Notifications
How Can I Limit Notifications to Those for Specific Events?
In some cases, you might want to send notifications for only a subset of the events that Operations
Manager monitors. You can set the events that are of interest to you when you define the notification
criterion:
• Specify an event set for a device-based notification criterion. You can create as many events sets as
you would like.
• Select the events that you want Operations Manager to monitor for Service Quality-based
notification criteria. There are few Service Quality-based events and you can select among them
when you add or edit Service Quality-based notification criteria.
Configuring Event Sets
Event sets enable you to group the events the you want Operations Manager to monitor for the purpose
of sending notifications.
Step 1 Select Notifications > Event Sets. The Event Set page appears. The Event Set page displays the
following information:
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GUI Element Description/Action
Check Box column Select one check box to edit, delete, or view an event set.
Event Set column Event set name.
Description column Event set description.
Add button Click to add an event set. See Adding and Editing an Event Set, page 14-5.
Edit button Click to edit an event set. See Adding and Editing an Event Set, page 14-5.
Delete button Click to delete an event set.
View button Click to view an event set. See Viewing an Event Set, page 14-6.
You can use event sets to:
• Limit the number of events that Operations Manager notification monitors. When you do not use
• Aggregate the notifications that you want to send to different destinations. For example, you can
Configuring Event Sets
event sets, Operations Manager notification monitors all events to determine whether to send a
notification.
create separate event sets for each of the following purposes:
–
Limit the amount of e-mail notification sent to specific individuals or departments to only those
for certain events.
–
Write all occurrences of particular events to syslog.
–
Send SNMP traps when certain events occur.
When you create device-based notification criteria, you must include an event set as one of the criteria.
The default event set, All_Events, includes all events.
For additional information, please see the following topic:
• Events Processed, page D-1
Adding and Editing an Event Set
Step 1 Select Notifications > Event Sets. The Event Set page appears, displaying the information in the
following table.
GUI Element Description/Action
Event Set column Event set name.
Description column Event set description.
Step 2 Do one of the following:
a. Click Add
b. Select a check box for an event set and click Edit.
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Depending on your selection, the Add Event Set or Edit Event Set page appears.
Step 3 Edit the information on the page, described in the following table.
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Configuring Event Sets
Step 4 Click OK to save your changes.
Chapter 14 Using Notifications
GUI Element Description/Action
Event Set Name field Event set name—Enter or edit the event set name.
Event Set Description field Event set description—Optional. Enter a description.
Events table
Number column Numbers events serially from one.
Check box column Select to add an event to the event set.
Deselect to remove the event from the event set.
Event column Event description.
For additional information, please see the following topic:
• Viewing an Event Set, page 14-6
• Events Processed, page D-1
Viewing an Event Set
Step 1 Select Notifications > Event Sets. The Event Set page appears, displaying the information in the
following table.
GUI Element Description/Action
Event Set column Event set name.
Description column Event set description.
Step 2 Select the check box for an event set and click View. The Event Set Summary dialog box appears,
displaying the following information:
• Event Set Name—User-supplied name.
• Event Set Description—User-supplied description.
• Selected Events—List of events in the event set.
For additional information, please see the following topic:
• Events Processed, page D-1
Deleting an Event Set
Step 1 Select Notifications > Event Sets. The Event Set page appears, displaying the information in the
following table.
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GUI Element Description
Event Set column Event set name.
Description column Event set description.
Step 2 Select the check box next to each event set that you want to delete.
Step 3 Click Delete. A confirmation dialog box appears.
Step 4 Click Ye s to confirm.
For additional information, please see the following topic:
• Events Processed, page D-1
Configuring Notifications
Configuring Notifications
The Notification Groups page is where notification management activities take place. To open the
Notification Groups page, select Notifications > Notification Criteria.
These topics explain the activities you can perform from the Notification Groups page:
• Adding and Editing Device Notification Groups, page 14-10
• Adding and Editing Service Quality Notification Groups, page 14-13
• Cloning a Notification Group, page 14-17
• Viewing Notification Group Configuration Details, page 14-18
• Deleting Device or Service Quality Notification Groups, page 14-18
• Suspending a Notification, page 14-18
• Resuming a Notification, page 14-19
Figure 14-1 shows an example of the Notification Groups page.
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