Configuring Health Center Alerts

PeopleSoft Health Center enables you to configure alerts for various metrics of your monitored systems. It enables you to set the threshold value, threshold frequency, and notification frequency, so you can control in what situations you want to be notified. The alerts help you to take proactive steps to address performance issues in your PeopleSoft systems.

A combination of the options can provide notifications to alert you against any performance issues. For example, you can use the combination of threshold value, threshold frequency, and monitoring interval such that you get notified when a selected metric exceeds the threshold value for a specified number of times for the duration of specified seconds.

PeopleSoft Health Center uses the Push Notification framework to notify you on the PIA of the monitoring system. Additionally, you can enable email notification using the Push Notification framework.

To generate and receive alerts, the following pre-requisites should be completed:

  • Configuration of Performance Monitor and PeopleSoft Health Center.

  • Configuration of Push Notification Framework, including setting the In-app and email notifications. See Setting Up Notifications

  • To receive alerts, a user must possess the PeopleTools Perfmon Client role.

Push Notification Framework enables you to choose the type of notifications that you want to receive. The default settings are already present, but you should check to ensure that the preferred notification types are selected. Complete the following steps:

  1. Administrators use the Notification Administration page (PeopleTools, Notifications, Notification Administration) to set the types of notifications. Contact your administrator and for the PHCPushNotification category, select the notification type, that is In-app, email, and text as per your business requirements. In-app type of notifications appear in the notification window on the PIA. For more information, refer to Administration and Development Task Overview.

  2. Users can navigate to the My Preferences page (Action menu, My Preferences) to personalize the notifications. On the My Preferences page, select Notifications from the left panel, and select the notification types for the Health Center notification. For more information, refer to Personalizing Notifications.

Use the Alert Configuration page to configure alerts for your monitored systems. You must ensure to provide values for all mandatory fields to generate alerts.

Access the Alert Configuration by selecting PeopleTools > Health Center > Configure Health Center Alerts.

This example illustrates the fields and controls on the Alert Configuration page. You can find definitions for the fields and controls later on this page.

 Alert Configuration page

Field or Control

Description

Monitoring Interval

Specify the time interval (in seconds) for monitoring. For example, if you enter 1000, domains are monitored every 1000 seconds.

Health Center does not impose a limit on maximum monitoring interval that you can specify, however the minimum interval should be greater than the polling frequency set in the Logstash pipeline configuration file located at (<LOGSTASH_HOME>/pt/config/LogstashPipeline.CONF). For example, if the polling frequency is set to 100 seconds, monitoring interval can be set to 1000 seconds.

When you set the monitoring interval, you should consider the number of systems being monitored and the number of alerts that are configured. The monitoring interval varies depending on these factors. It is not advisable to set a low value for monitoring interval in an environment where you have configured many alerts. As a general practice, it is advisable to set the monitoring interval to a higher value in a production environment.

Database Name

Choose a database that you want to monitor.

Name of the Metric

Choose a metric that you want to configure an alert for.

Comparison Operator

Choose either greater than or less than as a comparison operator.

Threshold Value

Specify a threshold value for the metric. If the system crosses the specified threshold value, an alert notification is generated.

Threshold Frequency

Specify a limit on the number of times the threshold value can be exceeded. If the system exceeds the specified limit, an alert notification is generated.

A combination of monitoring interval value, threshold value, and threshold frequency value generates alerts. The threshold frequency value is associated with the Logstash fetch of metrics. Logstash fetches metrics for every polling frequency that is specified in the Logstash pipeline configuration file. For example, let’s specify that the total physical memory is less than 1000 MB for a threshold frequency of 10 and the monitoring interval is 1000 seconds. In this scenario, an alert is generated when the total physical memory goes below 1000 MB for 10 fetches of Logstash within 1000 seconds (monitoring interval).

Frequency to Notify

Specifies how often the alert notification is to be sent to the monitoring PIA.

Valid options are:

  • Single - An alert notification is generated only once for a configured metric, the first time the monitored system crosses the configured values. It will not be generated again unless the Logstash instance is restarted.

  • Repeated - For every monitoring interval, an alert notification is sent if the monitored system crosses the configured values. For example, if the monitoring interval is set to 1000 seconds, alerts are generated every 1000 seconds if the configured values are exceeded.

No of Domains

Displays the number of domains for which alert configuration is set.

Domain Details icon

Click the chevron icon to display the Domain Details page where you can choose the domains that you want the alerts to be configured. The number of selected domains appears under the No of Domains column.

Note: The Domain Details page does not display if the values on the row or the Monitoring Interval field are not entered.

On the Domain Details page, the domains are displayed if you’ve configured Performance Monitor and PeopleSoft Health Center correctly.

After you complete the configuration of the PeopleSoft Notification Framework, ensure that Logstash recognizes the alerts configuration by generating a new version of ThresholdParams.json and restarting the Logstash service.

Generate a New ThresholdParams.json

  1. Review <LOGSTASH_HOME>\pt\config\JsonLogstash.properties and ensure that the IB REST URL (IBServiceURL) points to the correct mid-tier host.

  2. Go to <LOGSTASH_HOME>\pt\bin and run the script FetchThreshold.bat (Microsoft Windows) or FetchThreshold.sh (Linux) to generate ThresholdParams.json.

Restart Logstash

Restart the Logstash service to identify the new alert settings and trigger them as needed.

See Starting the Logstash Service.