DCE Notification Question

[DCIM_Support]

With regards to Alarms and Alarm notification, a customer is occasionally running into a scenario when a whole office/site goes offline due to a circuit outage or WAN router problem, They get bombarded with an email notification from all devices in that office.  Is StruxureWare smart enough to recognize this kind of outage and filter the email notifications down to 1 notification?  

• This could be solved by using the alarm configuration tab to turn off all unwanted alarms, right?

(CID:120131802)

[DCIM_Support]

Logan, this is probably a very frustrating thing for your customer, they're not alone.

What you're asking for is called "root cause analysis" and it is actually very difficult to achieve.  Some customers spend $000's trying to implement this (and other types of "event correlation" functions like transient suppression") and never quite get there.   They typically use purpose built event correlation software which DCE is not, even though it has some capabilities in this area, e.g. de-duplication.

If this is a regular occurrence for your customer then I'd be asking why the link goes down so often and see if that could be corrected.  I would also ask if all alarms are really required for all  recipients.  They may also like to try to adjust DCE polling to be less aggressive, e.g. may be more tolerant of short outages.

Turning off unwanted alarms, as you suggest, is a good idea.  Another option to consider is that the DCE web client may be a better fit for some event recipients, they can see the state of things only when they want to.  

I hope the above helps

Cheers

(CID:120131833)

[DCIM_Support]

Hey Ed, 

This helps a lot. I will get back with the customer and advise. 

Thank you!

(CID:120132320)

[DCIM_Support]

Hi Logan,

I thought there was an enhancement request for this in the system but I've been unable to find it so I've added this post in with a new enhancement request. I know this question has come up and no, there is no logic in DCE to configure to send a single e-mail for multiple alerts.

On a side note, I'm not sure that something like this will make it into 7.x DCE. It may have to wait for the next generation system, I can't say with any certainty.

Thanks,

Steve.

(CID:120132241)

[DCIM_Support]

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