Understanding Event and Alert Management › Alert Queues

Alert Queues

Alert queues are user-defined alert groups. CA SOI auto-assigns alerts to a particular alert queue based on user-defined policy, which can include alert content and associated CIs. Alert queues let you group alerts as they come in based on specific criteria to monitor the status of your infrastructure more efficiently. You can add global and non-global escalation policies to alert queues to take a specified action automatically on alerts that come into a queue.

For example, consider a company with engineers responsible for different aspects of the infrastructure, such as networks, systems, and databases. Without defined queues, alerts from all integrated domain managers appear in one consolidated view on the Alert Queues tab. The administrator can define queues by domain (such as Network Alerts or Database Alerts). With organized queues, engineers can quickly find and resolve their alerts. Additional queues could be defined based on other alert categories, such as severity, assignment status, and description to enable an optimized unified alert management system.

Services provide a similar organizational function as alert queues at a higher level with the additional benefit of resource topology and impact analysis. Defining alert queues is less intensive than modeling services, and they can simplify alert management as you make the transition to a service-oriented management paradigm. Alert queues can also remain useful in an environment with services defined to provide a supplemental management perspective outside of services. For example, you can define a queue for alerts that have not been acknowledged or a queue for alerts from the same source domain manager.

For more information and procedures about alert queues, see the Event and Alert Management Best Practices Guide.