How Do I Suppress Command Center Alarm Related Actions For a Particular Time Period?

Use Case

Greg is a Command Center (CC) admin who does not wish to receive Command Center alarm related email alerts during out-of-business hours or during scheduled maintenance periods. He is looking for a way to be able to supress these notifications for a desired time period.

Introduction to Command Center alarms and alarm related actions

Command Center acts as an SNMP manager for the devices that are added on it for management purpose. The NetScaler/ CloudBridge devices send SNMP traps to Command Center from the time they are discovered on it. Command Center correlates the history of such individual traps to form alarms. Some of these alarms may be of critical severity needing immediate attention. For example, an ’entityDown’ alarm may require an admin’s immediate attention. For such purposes, an admin can configure ‘Alarm triggers’ to notify himself at the right time.

“Alarm triggers” enable an administrator to filter the alarms he is interested in and take actions on those filtered list of alarms. The associated actions permitted are sending an e-mail, suppressing alarms, running commands, forwarding the traps and executing a task.

Example: A snapshot of a configured ‘Alarm Trigger’ (with action: send email) is as shown below:

Suppressing Command Center alarm trigger related actions

“Alarm triggers” can be made active or inactive by enabling or disabling them from the Command Center GUI. But consider a scenario where the admin wants to activate or deactivate an alarm only for a specific time period. How can the admin achieve this use case??? This can be made possible by creating filters on the “Alarm Triggers” and scheduling them at appropriate time intervals.

Configuration Steps

Example: If you want to suppress an alarm action during the weekly maintenance period which is every week Sunday between 7am to 11pm, you will need to create two scheduled filters: one to disable the alarm at Sunday 7am and the other to enable the alarm at Sunday 11pm.

Step 1: ?? Schedule a filter to disable the Alarm Trigger

Login to Command Center GUI and navigate to Fault module -> SNMP -> Alarms -> Triggers.?? Select the Alarm that is to be disabled and click on ‘Schedule a filter’.??

De-select the ‘Enable filter’ checkbox and input the day/time of the week when you wish to disable this alarm.

Below mentioned configuration will disable the alarm every Sunday at 7am.

Step 2: ?? Schedule a filter to enable the alarm trigger

On GUI: Under CC -> Fault module -> SNMP -> Alarms -> Triggers,
Select the same alarm (that is to be enabled) and click on ‘Schedule a filter’

Check the ‘Enable filter’ checkbox and input the day/time of the week when you wish to enable this alarm. Below mentioned configuration will enable the alarm every Sunday at 11pm (23).

Step 3: ?? View the scheduled filters to confirm the desired settings

Login to Command Center GUI and navigate to Fault module -> SNMP -> Alarms -> Triggers and click on Scheduled Filters

Conclusion

Alarm triggers are an important alerting feature popularly used by Command Center users to receive important notifications but receiving alarm trigger related notifications during a maintenance activity can get annoying and overwhelming. By following the simple steps given in this guide, you can configure such alarm triggers to notify you only during time periods when you need them.