What is Alerting Rules and Alerts inheritance?
Q: Can you explain in more details inheritance of alerts and alerting rules?
A: A number of parameters used to create monitors are inherited from other object types.
For 4.0.8652 and newer release: The following inheritance rules are in effect (available from a node Alerting tab ) for Alerting Rules:
- can be inherited from the monitor’s parent host
- can be selected from a global list of named rules (a named rule can be used for any node)
- can be set specifically for a given monitor (and can’t be used for any other node)
When you changes Alert or Alerting Rule the following inheritance rules are in effect:
- if a named Alerting rule is changed, this affects all the nodes (monitors, hosts, monitor groups, etc) using this named rule
- if a named Alert is changed, all the Alerting Rules that use this alert are affected immediately
These inheritance rules can be used to quickly apply mass change to a number of monitors. An example: create a named rule, assign it to a host let the monitor inherit the rule from it. In this case, if the specific named rule is changed, all the changes are immediately in effect for all the monitors that ‘received’ this rule from host they inherit alerting rule from.
For 3.5.8152 and older release: The following inheritance rules are in effect (available from Property Editor) for Alerting Rules:
- can be directly specified (from the list of named alerting rules, see the “Tools” menu -> Settings” -> “Alerting rules”)
- can be inherited from monitor type
- can be inherited from host
- can be a custom one, created for the given monitor (one can created either a monitor-specific rule, or a new global rule)
Availability and Performance Monitoring parameters can be inherited from monitor type (corresponding checkbox in Property Editor is selected by default), or may be custom ones.
When you changes Alert or Alerting Rule the following inheritance rules are in effect:
- if a named Alerting rule is changed, this affects all the monitors and hosts using this named rule
- if monitor type settings are changed, all the monitor inheriting monitor type settings are affected
These inheritance rules can be used to quickly apply mass change to a number of monitors. An example: create a named rule, assign it to a host or monitor type and let the monitor inherit the rule from either of those. In this case, if the specific named rule is changed, all the changes are immediately in effect for all the monitors that ‘received’ this rule from host/monitor type they inherit alerting rule from.
