InSite Alarming
Essent offers a sophisticated event notification system specifically designed for wireless telecommunication events and measurements called Essent Alert! The system includes the Essent Alert! Monitoring Agent, Essent Soft Alarm Processor, and the Essent Alert! Notification services to provide a comprehensive self-contained system.
Essent Alert! includes the ability to monitor hard alarms and generate soft alarms based on correlated events and measurement control limits. Essent Soft Alarms are notifications sent directly to users or to a centralized receiver such as a ticketing system, based on user defined thresholds that have been reached. The Essent Alert! Notification service receives alarms from the Alert! Monitoring service and delivers them based on administrator configured options. Alert! Notification can deliver the alarm as an SNMP packet, a NET SEND, or an email.
Event management is real-time. The InSite Data Parsers communicate with the database and log errors and warnings while parsing data. The Alert! Monitoring Agent can be configured to generate alarms based on these errors and warnings.
Database Server warning and error logging tools can be integrated with the Alert! Monitoring Agent so that these errors and warnings are sent through Alert! Notification. This consolidates database server errors and InSite system errors into one unified notification portal. Thus, a database server warning regarding disk space or table corruption is funneled into the same tracking system the hard alarms involving InSite Parsers and file transfer services are delivered.
Essent Soft Alarm Processor generates queries based on user definitions and runs them against performance data to generate soft alarms. A user can create a Soft Alarm definition based on any field, formula, or counter supported in the system. The user defines the criteria to apply to the alarm, such as topology filtering and the duration of data to query. The user also defines the threshold that must be met in order for an alarm to be triggered and the alarm severity: minor, major, or severe. An example of an Essent Soft Alarm definition would be to create the definition as such that an alarm should be triggered for any sector in the Market X with a percentage of dropped calls greater than 5 % where the number of call attempts is greater than 200 in the last 24 hours. To create this definition, the user would select the Market X to filter the topology, define a threshold of Percent Dropped Calls > 5 % and Call attempts > 200 with a duration of 24 hours. Once this alarm is defined and activated, the Soft Alarm Processor will continually run a query against the Performance Data in the database and generate an alarm for any sectors that met the criteria and put that alarm in the Soft Alarm queue. The Alert! Monitoring Agent continually checks the Soft Alarm queue for any new alarms and delivers the alarm to Alert! Notification as soon as it finds one. Alert! Notification in turn delivers the alarm to which ever recipient it is configured to send it to.
Through Essent® Alert! InSite® has the ability to monitor itself and notify administrators and support teams instantly of issues or warnings. Essent Alert! Monitoring Agent can repetitively check the status of all Essent InSite services and generate a hard alarm if a service fails or is inadvertently stopped by accident or due to an unplanned shutdown. The Alert! Monitoring Agent can also check the availability of network shares and database connectivity. The Alert! Monitoring Agent queries the Soft Alarm Queue for any soft alarms and delivers the alarms to the Alert! Notification service.
Essent Alert! is modular, scalable, and redundant. The modular system allows all elements to be used in concert or select components integrated with legacy alarming infrastructures. Multiple instances of all elements can be implemented allowing the system to scale as needed and provided redundancy where desired.