False Alert for SLA monitoring within a Load Balancer

Products

• iDash Workload Automation for CA 7

Issue/Introduction

We had one particular alert that produced a call out to an application support staff. However, the actual job finished and met the SLA. When I checked the console, the job showed the SLA had met; however, the alert list showed the alarm for the job.  Why did this occur and how can this be avoided in the future?

Environment

Release : 12.0

Component : CA WORKLOAD AUTOMATION iDASH FOR CA 7

Resolution

With a load balancer traffic needs to go to both machines (Note: iDash will not work in HA with a load balancer - both machines need events and need to be able to talk to one another). This problem is usually resolved by adding the JFM target in the idash.conf file, using the IP of the machine instead of the hostname. IPs usually don't get load balanced, so this almost always resolves the issue. We would suggest also having the primary and secondary URLs in the Admin Tool also replaced with the IP addresses. The secondary iDash server needs to be able to contact the primary, and if the hostname might not get it there because of the load balancer, it will try to take over and that will just continue the bad behavior.