Overview

Alerts are system messages that notify of failures or malfunctions, which require urgent human reactions or cannot be resolved without human assistance. An alert can be raised, for example, when a critical system error occurs, when an important OSGi service is not available in the framework, or when some minor problem has been reached. Alerts can be generated by the bundles running on the CC, MSs, RASs or received from a Managed Device (MD). Bundles that need to raise alert messages handle this themselves, the system does not automatically create alerts.

Any alert is targeted towards a specified user or group. For example, failures in the RM system are in the competence of users from the Administration group or the system user, while the application-specific modules can generate alerts targeted to the appropriate service providers. An interesting feature of the RM alert service is that any user can retrieve any alerts available in the RM, not only the ones targeted to him(her)self. The reason for this is that each alert can provide important information about the reasons for problems occurring in the system, so it can be useful even for users that are not the target user of the alert.

Alert Properties

Each generated alert contains the following information in itself:

• Time - Contains the exact date and time of the alert's raising.
• Level - The severity level of the problem (Critical, Middle or Low) of the alert.
• Backend Host - Contains the ID of the host originating the alert.
• Participant - Contains the ID of the MS if the alert has been raised by a backend host with management server role or of the managed device in case the alert is for a device.
• Bundle Name - Shows the name of the bundle that originated the alert.
• Bundle Location - Indicates the URL of the bundle, originator of the alert.
• Bundle Id - Contains the ID of the bundle sending the alerting message.
• Host Roles - Shows the roles implied by the alert source.
  • If the alert is for a backend host, this property shows host's backend roles (CC, MS, RAS, <managementServerID> described in refer to the Backend Infrastructure document).
  • If the alert is for a device, this property shows the device type.
• Message - Contains the message describing the alert. It has a popup menu that allows you to copy the text, or adjust the word wrap for better viewing

Alert Board

Alerts are stored in a service called figuratively alert board. The alert board service stores all incoming alerts and allows components interested in the alerts to retrieve them from there. Interested bundles can use miscellaneous filtering criteria for retrieving the alerts, for example: target user, component ID, bundle name, etc. The alert board service periodically inspects the backend server host and the devices managed by it for changes in the available alerts. The time period at which the service checks for changes in the alerts is defined by value of the Refresh Interval configuration property.

When the problem causing the generation of an alert disappears or is solved, bundles should remove the corresponding alert. This is not done automatically by the alert board service but is to be handled by bundles themselves.

Installation and Setup

Required Bundles

To be able to use the alert board of RM, you need to have the RM Backend Alerts bundle (packages/system/alert.jar) running on each backend server host. By default, this bundle is running when you start the backend framework, so you don't need to install any components unless you have explicitly uninstalled this bundle.

Configuring the RM Alerts Bundles

The RM Backend Alerts bundle possesses a bundle configuration with name "Backend Supervisor" and PID: prm.alerts.pid. It contains the following configuration property:

You can edit the bundles' configurations through console.

User Interface

The System Alerts dashboard view of console allows you to browse the alerts coming into the system. See Alert Board User's Guide for details.