Cisco Systems OL-24201-01 Evaluating Alarm Thresholds, System Alarms, Evaluation Cycle1, 12-2

Chapter 12 Managing Alarms

Understanding Alarms

System Alarms

System alarms notify you of critical conditions encountered during the execution of the ACS Monitoring and Reporting viewer. System alarms also provide informational status of system activities, such as data purge events or failure of the log collector to populate the View database.

You cannot configure system alarms, which are predefined. However, you do have the option to disable system alarms or decide how you want to be notified if you have enabled them.

This section contains the following topics:

•Evaluating Alarm Thresholds, page 12-2

•Notifying Users of Events, page 12-3

Evaluating Alarm Thresholds

ACS evaluates the threshold conditions based on a schedule. You define these schedules and, while creating a threshold, you assign a schedule to it. A schedule consists of one or more continuous or noncontinuous periods of time during the week.

For example, you can create a schedule that is active from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. See Understanding Alarm Schedules, page 12-9for more information. When you assign this schedule to a threshold, ACS evaluates the threshold and generates alarms only during the active period.

ACS evaluates the thresholds periodically depending on the number of thresholds that are currently enabled.

Table 12-1provides the length of the evaluation cycle for a given number of thresholds.

Table 12-1 Evaluation Cycle of Alarm Thresholds

Number of Enabled Thresholds	Evaluation Cycle1
1 to 20	Every 2 minutes
21 to 50	Every 3 minutes
51 to 100	Every 5 minutes

1.If the time taken to evaluate the thresholds increase, then the evaluation cycle increases from 2 to 3 minutes, 3 to 5 minutes, and from 5 to 15 minutes. The evaluation cycle time is reset to 2, 3, and 5 minutes every 12 hours.

When an evaluation cycle begins, ACS evaluates each enabled threshold one after another. If the schedule associated with the threshold allows the threshold to be executed, ACS evaluates the threshold conditions. An alarm is triggered if the condition is met. See Creating, Editing, and Duplicating Alarm Thresholds, page 12-11for more information.

Note System alarms do not have an associated schedule and are sent immediately after they occur. You can only enable or disable system alarms as a whole.

	User Guide for Cisco Secure Access Control System 5.3
12-2	OL-24201-01