CDM suppression key for disk alarms is used for disk space and disk available alarms, causing undesired alarm suppression

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

When cdm generates an alert for a disk free threshold it creates a message like 

Disk free error - Average (5 samples) disk free on \\(ip.address)\path\to\disk is now 0.00%, which is below the error threshold (5%) out of total size 499.9 GB

with a supp key like 

disk/\\(ip.address)\path\to\disk

and when it clears that alarm it sends a message like

Disk clear - \\(ip.address)\path\to\disk  available again

 

CDM also has availability and connectivity events that it detects. For instance, if there is a network connectivity issue an alarm that looks like this is generated:

Network connection error; \\(ip.address)\path\to\disk Access is denied.  

The problem is that its supp key is the same as the disk free alarm:

disk/\\(ip.address)\path\to\disk

 

This can cause undesired behavior - you could miss one of the alarms because it got suppressed "underneath" the other, or one condition clearing may undesirably clear the alarm for the other condition. 

Addtionally, since free space and connectivity are separate concerns, these should be tracked separately - tickets related to each behavior might be routed to separate teams, for example, and we need a way to keep them separated.

Resolution

The next version of CDM (after 7.11) will contain a fix for this issue so that suppression keys for these alarms will be separated.

'Connectivity' alarms will have a suppkey like:

disk_info/\\(ip.address)\path\to\disk

While "Free Space" alarms will have a suppkey like:

disk_alarm/\\(ip.address)\path\to\disk