Administration Guide › Using Rules and Actions › Rules and Actions

Rules and Actions

To configure rules and actions, you must first understand what they are and how they interact with each other and other components. By understanding these interactions, you can best decide how to set up your rules and actions to manage your data center efficiently.

CA Virtual Assurance collects and analyzes metrics and then makes intelligent decisions based on the analysis about how to distribute resources. For example, if CA Virtual Assurance determines that a server or a service is overutilized or underutilized, it can provision a new computer.

Usage is monitored at the server level and the service level. Server level monitoring involves diagnosing problems with a specific server and only key performance indicators are used. Service level monitoring diagnoses problems with the service as a whole and overall usage is used as the performance indicator.

Rules can be created at the server level or the service level. You create rules to evaluate performance metrics and generated events. Rules are composed of individual or combinations of conditions which must evaluate overall to a true state for an action to be taken. You can create your own rules or you can select a set of rule templates to generate rules using automation policy.

Note: For a list of performance metrics and descriptions, see the Performance Metrics Reference.

By default, the rules are evaluated at the recording interval defined in the collection settings at the data center level (default = 300 seconds) or when events occur because of monitored metric values. You can configure specific servers to override the default data center recording interval when you want to set an interval that differs from the data center. Server level rules are evaluated at the configured server level recording interval. Service level rules are evaluated at the shortest recording interval among all the servers within that service. When you change the recording interval, stop and restart the Policy Manager service to retrieve and use the updated interval for rule evaluation.

Metrics are the source of the evaluation data. When a metric rule evaluates to true, the action is triggered. The lag must be exceeded for a rule to evaluate to true. In some scenarios, you would want a one-time breach of a rule to trigger an action so you would set your lag to one, but in other instances you would not want a one-time event to trigger a rule.

For example, CA Virtual Assurance is integrated with CA SDM, which is a customer support application that manages calls, tracks problem resolution, shares corporate knowledge, and manages IT assets. If you want to open tickets automatically when your action is triggered, you can set your actions to interact with CA SDM. This arrangement is useful for actions requiring third-party approval. After the third party approves your ticket in CA SDM, the action will automatically run.

You can also schedule your actions to run at specified times using the initiation component. The current parameters for the action are saved when you create the job. If you change the action details after the job has been submitted, it will not have an impact on jobs that you have already scheduled to run. If you must change the action details of a job that has already been scheduled, open the job that uses the action and save it again to update it with the new action details.