16.2. Alerts and Responses to Changing Conditions

A critical part of monitoring is being aware of when undesirable events occur. Alerting works with other functions in JBoss ON management (monitoring data and configuration drift detection) to define conditions for triggering an alert.
When an alert condition is met, alerting in JBoss ON serves two important functions:
  • Alerts communicate that there has been a problem, based on parameters defined by an administrator.
  • Alerts respond to incidents automatically. Administrators can automatically initiate an operation, run a JBoss ON CLI script to change JBoss ON or resource configuration, redeploy content, or run a shell script, all in response to an alert condition.
    Automatic, administrator-defined responses to alerts make it significantly easier for administrators to address infrastructure problems quickly, and can mitigate the effect of outages.
Alerts are based on metrics information, call-time data, availability, and events, all normal monitoring elements. Alerting can also be based on critical changes to a resource, defined in drift definitions that track configuration drift. Tracking configuration for resources along with monitoring data lets administrators remedy unplanned or undesirable system changes easily and consistently.