Alert Management Training File

Introduction

The alert management training file is a CSV (comma-separated values) file that provides input data for machine learning to understand alert patterns and drive the following:

• First response
• Alert escalation

The data is saved in a table structured format. The training file is generally a text file containing information separated by commas and plays a key role in alert management.

Downloading a sample training file

The sample training file (downloadable from OpsRamp) contains sample metric names. As provided in the training file, alerts triggered in a sequence (as provided in the training file) are correlated.

To download a sample training file:

1. From All Clients, select the client.
2. Go to Setup > Alerts > Alert Escalation or First Response.
3. From the respective policies page, click +.
4. In the policies page:
   1. Alert Escalation policy: From Import Dataset and Train Model section, click Alert_Escalation_Training_Example.csv to download a sample training file.
   2. First Response policy: Select Suppress specific alerts or Snooze specific alerts for a given time. Click Alert_First_Response_Training_File_Example.csv to download a sample training file.

Creating a training file

A training file can be created or modified from the sample training file.

To create a training file:

1. Open a spreadsheet.
2. Enter the metric names.
   Alerts triggered in the specified sequence are correlated.
3. Save the training file as CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited).

When a machine-learning algorithm is doing the prediction, it uses the row which has the most exact matches. If two rows have the same matching values, the machine-learning algorithm uses the first row it encountered.

Example of empty cell usage

A user wants to route alerts in the following manner:

• The disk.utilization metric that is triggered on Windows resources go to the Windows Disk Management Support team.
• All other metrics for Windows resources go to the Windows Support team.

The following shows an empty metric cell on the second row which indicates all other metrics:

When a machine-learning algorithm is doing the prediction, it uses the row which has the most exact matches. If two rows have the same matching values, the machine-learning algorithm uses the first row it encountered.

Sample training file for alert escalation

The sample training file (downloadable from OpsRamp) contains the fields clientUniqueId, metric, resource.generalInfo.resourceType, component, incident.assigneeGroup.name.

Sample training file for first response policy

The sample training file (downloadable from OpsRamp) contains the fields clientUniqueId, metric, resource.generalInfo.resourceType, currentState, component, suppressed, snoozeDuration, processIds.

Key considerations

Alert, resource, incident attributes, and metric names are case-sensitive.

The following table provides the metric name representation for a particular monitor.

Input column attributes

Types of input columns available are Predefined attributes and Custom attributes.

Predefined attributes

Predefined attributes are the default attributes supported for a training file. The attributes are derived from alert and resoource attributes. Use the Get Alert API to retrieve alert attributes and Get Resource API to retrieve resource attributes.

Following are example column names for alert and alert resource attributes:

Custom attributes

Custom attributes (tags) are definable and these attributes drive escalating and suppressing alerts. For example, in an organization, resources are divided into three tiers Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. Different tiers represent different importance. Tier 1 is a critical and highly business impacting resource. If Tier 1 resource is down, the business can be highly impacted and needs immediate attention. Therefore, assigning the resource and its related alerts to a skilled personnel is equally important. In this example, Tier is the custom attribute name and Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 are the custom attribute values.

To process to use a custom attribute is the following:

1. Create a training file.
2. Specify a column with resource.tag.<tag_name>. For example, resource.tag.Tier.
3. Add the values of the custom attributes.
   Example: Tier 1.

   

   Note: Multiple tag names are allowed as separate columns.

Considerations

The following are considerations for adding resource group or service group attributes:

• To specify more than one device group or service group in the column names resource.deviceGroup.name and resource.serviceGroup.name, list each group separately in a row.
• If a group has parents, use the full path to specify the child group. For example, to specify a grandChild group, provide the full path as Parent > Child > grandChild. Similarly, to specify a child group, provide the path as Parent > Child in the training file.

Output column attributes

The following the column names are used for learned configurations:

Alert Escalation:

• incident.assigneeGroup.name
• incident.category.name
• incident.subCategory.name
• incident.priority
• incident.cc
• incident.businessImpact.name
• incident.urgency.name
• incident.knowledgeArticleIds

First Response:

• suppressed
• snoozeDuration
• processIds

FAQs

What are the agent versions?

• Windows Agent: G2 Agent version starts with the 6 series.
  Example: 6.00.0011
• Linux Agent: G2 Agent version starts with the 4. or 5. series.
  Example: 5.2.1-1

How do I check the agent version on a resource?

To check the agent version:

1. Select a client from the All Clients list.
2. Select Infrastructure, select the resource type, and click the resource name.
3. From the left pane, click Attributes.
4. Click More Information and view the OpsRamp Agent Version.