Alarm History

The alarm history feature integrates with Elasticsearch to provide long term storage and maintain a history of alarm state changes.

When enabled, alarms are indexed in Elasticsearch when they are created, deleted, or when any of the "interesting" fields on the alarm are updated (more on this below.)

Alarms are indexed so that operators can answer the following questions:

  1. What were all the state changes of a particular alarm?

  2. What was the last known state of an alarm at a given point in time?

  3. Which alarms were present (i.e. not deleted) on the system at a given point in time?

  4. Which alarms are currently present on the system?

A simple REST API is also made available for the purposes of evaluating the results, verifying the data that is stored and providing examples on how to query the data.

Requirements

This feature requires Elasticsearch 7.0+.

Setup

Alarm history indexing can be enabled as follows:

First, log in to the Karaf shell of your Meridian instance and configure the Elasticsearch client settings to point to your Elasticsearch cluster. See Elasticsearch Integration Configuration for a complete list of available options.

$ ssh -p 8101 admin@localhost
...
admin@opennms()> config:edit org.opennms.features.alarms.history.elastic
admin@opennms()> config:property-set elasticUrl http://es:9200
admin@opennms()> config:update

  1. To make the alarm history feature start automatically on future service starts, add the line opennms-alarm-history-elastic to the file ${OPENNMS_HOME}/etc/featuresBoot.d/alarm.boot. (Create the file if it does not exist.)

  2. To make the alarm history feature start now, log in to the Karaf shell and run the following command to load the feature:

    feature:install opennms-alarm-history-elastic

Alarm indexing

When alarms are initially created, we push a document to Elasticsearch that includes all of the alarm fields as well as additional details on some of the related objects (i.e., the node.)

In order to avoid pushing a new document every time a new event is reduced on to an existing alarm, we only push a new document when (at least) one of these conditions are met:

  1. We have not recently pushed a document for that alarm. (See alarmReindexDurationMs.)

  2. The severity of the alarm has changed.

  3. The alarm has been acknowledged or unacknowledged.

  4. Either of the associated sticky or journal memos have changed.

  5. The state of the associated ticket has changed.

  6. The alarm has been associated with, or removed, from a situation.

  7. A related alarm has been added or removed from the situation.

To change this behavior and push a new document for every change, you can set indexAllUpdates to true.

When alarms are deleted, we push a new document that contains the alarm id, reduction key, and deletion time.

The following table describes a subset of the fields in the alarm document:

Field Description

@first_event_time

Timestamp in milliseconds associated with the first event that triggered this alarm.

@first_event_time

Timestamp in milliseconds associated with the last event that triggered this alarm.

@update_time

Timestamp in milliseconds at which the document was created.

@deleted_time

Timestamp in milliseconds when the alarm was deleted.

id

Database ID associated with the alarm.

reduction_key

Key used to reduce events on to the alarm.

severity_label

Severity of the alarm.

severity_id

Numerical ID used to represent the severity.

Options

In addition to those mentioned in Elasticsearch Integration Configuration, you can set the following optional properties in ${OPENNMS_HOME}/etc/org.opennms.features.alarms.history.elastic.cfg:

Property Description Default

indexAllUpdates

Index every alarm update, including simple event reductions.

false

alarmReindexDurationMs

Number of milliseconds to wait before re-indexing an alarm if nothing "interesting" has changed.

3600000

lookbackPeriodMs

Number of milliseconds to go back when searching for alarms.

604800000

batchIndexSize

Maximum number of records inserted in a single batch insert.

200

bulkRetryCount

Number of retries until a bulk operation is considered failed.

3

taskQueueCapacity

Maximum number of tasks to hold in memory.

5000