Hawkular Alerts in ManageIQ

In ManageIQ, two terms are used:

ManageIQ has support for several types of infrastructure items, but Hawkular Middleware Manager supports only a subset of them. Middleware servers are an example of infrastructure items that are supported by Hawkular.

Hawkular’s alerting module has several kinds of objects (and terms). The two objects that are relevant from a ManageIQ perspective are:

Currently, ManageIQ creates group triggers that raise events (not alerts) and polls Hawkular to catch the events and run configured actions, if needed.

When a user creates a ManageIQ alert, a Hawkular group trigger is created in the background. From then, any changes to the ManageIQ alert are replicated to the associated Hawkular group trigger until the alert is deleted, which causes the group trigger to also be deleted.

While ManageIQ alerts have a direct relation with Hawkular group triggers, ManageIQ alert profiles are a little bit more complicated. For each alert in a ManageIQ profile, one Hawkular group member is created for each infrastructure item in the profile.

This means that nothing is created in Hawkular if:

If a ManageIQ alert profile has one alert and has assigned multiple infrastructure items, then the relevant Hawkular group trigger will have as many members as infrastructure items are in the ManageIQ alert profile.

If a ManageIQ alert profile has multiple alerts and has assigned only one infrastructure item, then each Hawkular group trigger will have one member.

With these two examples, you should be able to guess what will happen if the ManageIQ alert profile has a set of alerts and a set of infrastructure items.

Alerts are created by navigating to Control > Explorer > Alerts. In the alerts tree, select the All alerts folder. This will enable the Add a New Alert option under the Configuration button.

In the form to create/edit an alert, be sure to select Middleware server in the Based On field. Currently, this is the only infrastructure item supported by Hawkular. If you choose something else, the alert won’t be managed by Hawkular. All other options can be filled as desired.

When the alert is created, it will be available in the control explorer and will be available to be included in an alert profile. In the background, a Hawkular group trigger is also created.

Alert profiles are created by navigating to Control > Explorer > Alert Profiles. In the alerts tree, select the Middleware server Alert Profiles item. This will enable the Add a Middleware Server Alert Profile option under the Configuration button.

In the form to create/edit an alert profile, write a description and select the desired alerts to evaluate. At least, one alert is required to be able to create the alert profile.

When the alert profile is created, it will be available in the control explorer which will also list the alerts contained in the profile. Nothing will be created in Hawkular because when the profile is created it is still not assigned to middleware servers.

To assign middleware servers to an alert profile, select the desired profile in the control explorer. In the toolbar, use the Edit assignments for this Alert Profile options under the Configuration button.

This will show the assignments page. An alert profile can be assigned to specific middleware servers or to all inventoried middleware servers (The Enterprise).

Once you have chosen the desired middleware servers (or the enterprise) and changes are saved, the view page of the alert will be displayed again.

In the background, Hawkular group members will be created to make effective the configuration and alerts should start triggering.

The timeline of ManageIQ Hawkular provider will log events if the configuration of an alert is enabled to show timeline events. Hawkular’s provider timeline can be accessed through the summary page of the provider, under the Monitoring menu:

If the alert has enabled the standard Show on Timeline configuration, the options to query the events are:

ManageIQ and Hawkular, albeit being two independent projects, they can be connected together to complement each other features. In this post is discussed how the alerting integration works and how to configure a basic alert.

At the time of writing, ManageIQ supports only Middleware Servers as targets and, also, only a limited set of metrics is available to configure alerts. There is ongoing work to provide a wider range of metrics and this is expected to be available in following versions.