1. Cloud Control Monitoring Guide
  2. Enterprise Monitoring
  3. Monitoring: Basics
  4. Advanced Threshold Management

Advanced Threshold Management

While metric baselines are generally useful for determining valid target alert thresholds, these thresholds are static and are not able to account for expected performance variation. There are monitoring situations in which different work loads for a target occur at regular (expected) intervals. Here, a static alert threshold would prove to be inaccurate. For example, the alert thresholds for a database performing Online Transaction Process (OLTP) during the day and batch processing at night would be different. Similarly, database workloads can change based purely on different time periods, such as weekday versus weekend. Thus, fixed static values for thresholds might result in false alert reporting, and with excessive alerting could generate excessive overhead with regard to performance management. For this OLTP example, using static baselines to determine accurate alert thresholds fails to account for expected cyclic variations in performance, adversely affecting problem detection. Static baselines introduce the following configuration issues:

  • Baselines configured for Batch performance may fail to detect OLTP performance degradation.

  • Baselines configured for OLTP performance may generate excessive alerts during Batch cycles

Beginning with Enterprise Manager Release 12.1.0.4, Advanced Threshold Management can be used to compute thresholds using baselines that are either adaptive (self-adjusting) or time-based (user-defined).

  • Adaptive Thresholds: Allows Enterprise Manager to statistically compute threshold that are adaptive in nature. Adaptive thresholds apply to all targets (both Agent and repository monitored).

  • Time-based Thresholds: Allows you to define a specific threshold values to be used at different times to account for changing workloads over time.

A convenient UI allows you to create time-based and adaptive thresholds. From a target home page (a host, for example), navigate to the Metric Collection and Settings page. Click Advanced Threshold Management in the Related Links region.

Only numeric and View Collect metrics can be registered as adaptive thresholds. In addition, only the following types of metrics are permitted:

  • Load

  • Load Type

  • Utilization and Response