Age of failure in dirscan probe

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)
• NIMSOFT PROBES

Issue/Introduction

Due to some misunderstandings and/or confusions that you can get while checking the dirscan's documentation, specially the "Age of file" threshold

Environment

Release: UIM 8.x or later
Component: UIMDRS

Resolution

Here is an example that can clarify this:

So, let's say you create a file at 10:00 a.m. and you want to keep track of the age of this file.

Intuitively, if you set the threshold to "> than 1 hour" and it's 10:30 a.m. (as an example), you would expect dirscan not to give you any alarms because the time difference from when you created the file until the current time is just 30 minutes, which is not greater than 60 (1 hour).

Well, the way this threshold works is different. In fact, you will get an alarm because the probe is expecting a value for the age of the file greater than 1 hour and, because this value is not there, an alarm would be raised.

While it's true that in the "Watch" field, you can see "Expect this value", I think that this is creating confusions among the customers and it's not very intuitive.

I would also like to mention the "Watch age of" filed and its options:

• oldest file: So, if you have more than one file, this will focused on the one that got created the earliest.
• newest file: In this case this will look for the file that got created the latest.
• individual files: It will check all your files one by one.