Precedence in MCS Profiles and Alarm Policies on device and group level

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)
• CA Unified Infrastructure Management On-Premise (Nimsoft / UIM)
• CA Unified Infrastructure Management SaaS (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

We are using MCS to create a cdm CPU Enhanced Profile and Alarm Policy.

• Configured a cdm profile on a device in a group
• Updated the associated alarm policy that is created by the system when the cdm profile is created.
• Added several additional conditions for devices in the group that differ.
• Copied the Profile to the group as documented in the UIM Guide.
  • ==> This causes a new Alarm Policy to be created and the previously configured Alarm Policy disappears. Now we do not see any way to configure additional conditions on the device level.
• Can you please assist to explain how this is supposed to be working? 

 

 

 

Environment

• Release: 20.4 any CU

Cause

Steps to reproduce:

Create a new profile for a device in a group.

Edit the alarm policy and add some conditions.

Copy the profile to the group (Windows in this example)

The profile is added to the Group.

The new alarm policy created does not have the conditions added before and the previous alarm policy is deleted.

We would expect that the added conditions were kept when copying the profile from a device to a whole group.

Resolution

Whenever we create a profile (some profiles create a default alarm policy) at the group level, it will be applied for all the devices in the group, and it is an expected behavior.

However, if we want to maintain a separate alarm policy for devices, we can create a separate alarm policy at the device level and it will not be overridden by any group policies because device-level configuration will give high precedence.

In order to maintain specific metrics at the device level we can enable the flag  enable_device_precedence in the MCS Raw Configure. This flag will give high priority to the device profile instead of the Group profile so the group profile can't override the device profile. 

 

Additional Information

Device Interval is a thread where for every 120 seconds all the devices which are in a modified state will be processed by MCS.

Group Interval is a thread where for every 900 seconds it will check if any devices removed or added to the group and it will delete or add group profiles to devices.