Problem Management

Problem Management (PM) supports the triage workflow for events. In Operations, the triage workflow is used as part of the Problem Management support process. In Q/A and Development, triage workflow is used as part of the bug triage process. When events are collected, Problem Management allows users to mark some events as "Behavior by Design" and convert others to a set of work items.

Here are some examples of how Problem Management may be used:

• A user analyzes exception events via SE-Viewer or Advisor reports, and considers a certain category of events (e.g. all 404 errors generated by web robots) as being non-critical and wants to disable collection.
• Instead of disabling collection, a user may want to mark events or put them into a certain status. For example, a user may want to separately treat all errors that happen due to web robot activity. Another example would be a user that wants to collect all errors due to invalid state, but put them into a “Behavior by Design” status 
• A user may want to set a custom alerting threshold or disable collection for certain types of performance events.
• A user may want to mark a group of events as “submitted for resolution” and attach those events to an issue or a work item
• A user may want to look all issues submitted for resolution and check the current status

AVIcode provides the notion of "problems" to simplify dealing with large number of events and to provide out-of-the-box analysis and reporting. Once a user configures the system via a simple wizard, events are automatically grouped into "Problems"  based on the problem's signature.  In some cases problem grouping may need to tuned to a specific application's needs.

Each event has a Problem Management Event Status through its lifetime in the SE-Viewer database. Some of statuses have a limited life time, which means that events with these statuses will be deleted by the database maintenance routine after a specified amount of time has been exceeded. Each status has a priority,  and rules containing actions with a higher priority will be processed first. The following event status types are supported:

Overview

Templates

SE-Viewer is delivered with a set of predefined templates that allow users to simplify process of new rule creation. Most  templates are similar to a PM Rule in that they have a list of conditions and actions, but unlike a PM rule some of conditions/actions may not have a value. Furthermore, certain templates may not contain conditions/actions at all.

A user can create new rule either based on an empty template (without predefined conditions/actions) or based on a selected template. In the second case wizard will automatically set all conditions and actions with values (if they are provided in the template).

Rule Overview

A Problem Management  Rule is a set of conditions that can describe an event or subset of events, and actions that can be applied to these events.

If a rule is created in restricted mode, the user that created this rule will be set as the Rule Owner, and once the Rule Owner has been set set it cannot be changed. [ For more information about restricted mode, please see Your Management SystemManaging EventsSecuring Data Access in this manual]. Some things to note about rule creation:

• If a rule has been created in restricted mode by a user that does not have administrative rights, this rule can be applied only to events that this user has access to. This is true for both new events and old events.
• Administrators can view and update rules created by any user.
• If a rule with a non-administrator Rule Owner is executed by an administrator, it will be applied to any event without consideration of user access.
• If an administrator changes a rule with a non-administrator Rule Owner, the user access restrictions will apply because rule owner will be not changed.

There are two ways that PM rules can be applied:

• After SE-Viewer has inserted a new event into the database
• After a rule has been created/modified in the PM Rule Management Wizard and the option ‘Apply to Database’ has been selected

Condition Overview

Conditions are the criteria for selecting events. By specifying a set of conditions the rule creator can determine which subset of events to apply this rule to. A condition consists of several parts:

Conditions are evaluated as follows::

• During processing the Event Parameter value is retrieved from event (either from new event or from an existing event)
• If the Event Parameter is NULL, the condition will not be evaluated
• The retrieved Event Parameter value is compared with Value specified by user using the Operation logic
• If the comparison succeeds then the condition is considered as successfully evaluated

Condition types

There are several types of conditions. Some of them must be added manually by the user, others can be selected from a  list of available values.

Strings

String conditions supports 4 wildcards that will be treated as described in table below:

By default string conditions are case-insensitive, although this behavior may be changed via the configuration file.

Here is a list of allowable String operations:

String Enums

Users can select a list of strings as a value for this condition. The condition will be evaluated to 'true' if one of strings matches the real value. String Enum conditions supports the same wildcards as simple String condition.

• Conditions of this type can be either editable (supporting custom values) or not (values can only be selected only from the predefined list)
• By default String Enum conditions are case-insensitive: this behavior can be changed via configuration file.

Here is a list of allowable String Enum operations:

Numeric

These conditions require numeric values only.

Here is a list of allowable Numeric operations:

Numeric Enum

These conditions require list of numbers as value.

Here is a list of allowable Numeric Enum operations:

Xml

These conditions expect a valid XPath expression as a value.

Here is a list of allowable XML operations:

Here is the list of  Available Conditions (Conditions are described in configuration file under “ProblemManagement \ Variables“):

Condition	Type	Apply to Event	Apply to old events
Event Class	String Enum	All	+
Source	String Enum (editable)	All	+
Computer	String Enum (editable)	All	+
Action	String	All	+
Request	String	All	+
Slow Call	String	Performance	+
Resource Call	String	Performance	+
Failed Function	String	Exception	+
Description	String	All	+
Component	String	All	+
Username	String	All	+
Exception Class	String	Exception	+
Duration	Numeric	Performance	+
Slow Call Duration	Numeric	Performance	+
Event ID	Numeric Enum (editable)	All	+
Event Group ID	Numeric Enum (editable)	All	+
Heavy / Light Status	Numeric Enum	Performance	+
Aspect	String Enum	All	+
Category (Critical or Non-critical)	String	Exception	+
Application Group ID	Numeric Enum	All	+
Body (Any valid xml XPath expression )	Xml	All	-
Call Stack Hash no value – Create a rule that will select events with the same call stack as a selected event. This option is only available from the Actions menu of and  Event Detail window and cannot be accessed from  the 'Tools' menu	String	Exception	-

Actions Overview

Action allows user to triage event by changing its PM properties.

Manual  Configuration

All PM entities are described in SE-Viewer Configuration file under “ProblemManagement” section.  Any PM entity has the following attributes in xml node:

The following table describes all types of PM entities. Note: Only entity properties that can be changed by user are described in table below. The rest of properties should not be changed in any case

Using the Rules Management Wizard

The rule management wizard can be used to create new rules or to edit or delete existing rules.

To Create or Edit Rules:

• Open Internet Explorer to SE-Viewer
• Open the 'Tools' menu
• Select the 'Rules Management wizard...' menu item Note that the Rules Management wizard is also accessible from the Actions menu of any Event Detail window, or by clicking on the status description at the top of any Event Detail window.
• Wait for the wizard to open to the Welcome screen.
• Select 'Create new" or 'Modify'
• Click Next
• For 'Create new': Select a template to create a new rule, or use the 'Empty template' option. If you select a defined template, the Description area will be filled in with the Conditions and Actions for this template. For 'Modify': Select a rule from the list that you wish to modify.

• Click Next
• Select a template to create a new rule, or use the 'Empty template' option. If you select a defined template, the Description area will be filled in with the Conditions and Actions for this template.

Click Next

• The Condition screen allows you to select one or more conditions for event selection, and edit the condition values to match.

This table describes the columns in the “Select Condition(s) panel:

Note that by default the conditions are sorted by “Selected (checkbox)”,”Conditions”, ”Event Types”, sand ”Apply to DB” columns, but the user can apply any order by clicking corresponding column header.

Refer to the "Condition Types" section above for information about valid values for various condition types.

Once your condition/value selections have been made, click the Show preview link to display which events satisfy the selected conditions. The columns displayed in the window are described in the following table:

Some conditions are incompatible with one another and will cause the error icon to be displayed, e.g. if one selected condition only applies to performance events and another selected condition only applies to exception events the information error message. Mousing over the error icon will provide a tool tip that explains the cause of the problem,

• Click Next. An error icon will be displayed and the wizard proceed to the next screen if a condition has an invalid value (e.g. if the user selects the  “Aspect” condition but does not select any value)
• The Select  Action screen allows to to associate an action and action value with the condition(s) you selected on the previous screen. The "Change Event Status" value may be set to "New", "Reviewed", "Deleted" or "By Design".
• Click Next.
• The Rule Description screen allows users to uniquely identify the rule that they have just created, The fields on this screen are:

• Click Next.
• The confirmation screen provides the opportunity to review the rule before saving/applying the changes. Click Back to make any changes.
• Click Next.
• The Progress screen will show the progress of database updates as the rule is applied to existing events. Otherwise the wizard will skip to the final screen.
• Click Next.
• The final screen displays:

• The status of the Rule creation/modification
• The status of  the Rule execution (if the 'Apply to Existing Events' option was selected)
• The count of events that were modified (if the 'Apply to Existing Events' option was selected) for the SE-Viewer database  and  Advisor database (if Advisor is  installed)
• An option to return to the first screen of the wizard

• Click Finish

To Delete Rules:

• Open Internet Explorer to SE-Viewer
• Open the 'Tools' menu
• Select the 'Rules Management wizard...' menu item Note that the Rules Management wizard is also accessible from the Actions menu of any Event Detail window.
• Wait for the wizard to open to the Welcome screen.
• Select  'Delete'
• Click Next
• The confirmation screen provides the opportunity to review the rule before deleting it.
• Click Next.
• The final screen displays:

• The status of the Rule deletion
• An option to return to the first screen of the wizard

• Click Finish

Last update: Thursday, December 02, 2010 12:36:50 PM