Understand BPPM As A Decision Maker - Part 8: Implementaion - combination of static and dynamic thresholds

We have gone through the details of static and dynamic thresholds in the last two posts.  In addition to set static thresholds and dynamic thresholds separately, you can also combine them on a BPPM server to add more flexibility in your threshold settings.

The first option is to add a dynamic adjustment to a static threshold.  In order to do that, you must set your static threshold at BPPM server not at each PATROL agent.  In addition to severity, duration, and threshold value that included in a normal static threshold, you can also add a dynamic adjustment here by specifying if the threshold violation also has to be outside a baseline.  You can select auto, hourly, daily, weekly, hourly+daily, and all baseline.

An example of the first option would be to set up a threshold for the number of login errors in the last data collection.  If you want to set a static threshold as 3, you may want to add 'outside auto baseline' as a dynamic adjustment so that the alert won't be raised if the baseline during that time of day (such as 9am) is 4.

The second option is to add a static adjustment to a dynamic threshold.  In addition to severity, duration, baseline, sampling window, absolute deviation, and percent deviation, you can also add a static adjustment here by specify if the threshold violation also has to violate a static threshold value. 

An example of the second option would be to set up a threshold for CPU utilization.  If you want to set a dynamic threshold as outside of auto baseline for 10 minutes with percent deviation as 15%, you may want to add a threshold value 50 as a static adjustment so that the alert won't be raised when the CPU utilization is 45% for 10 minutes even the baseline is 35%.

You may wonder what the difference is between the first option and the second option.  When should you use static threshold with dynamic adjustment and when should you use dynamic threshold with static adjustment?

Dynamic threshold with static adjustment contains deviation in absolute value and in percent value.  This feature is not available with static thresholds.  Using deviation in a dynamic threshold gives you a cushion or buffer when comparing to a baseline.  I personally find this feature very useful and I use deviation in most of my dynamic thresholds with or without static adjustments.

Static threshold with dynamic adjustment contains a 'predict' feature.  This feature is not available with dynamic thresholds.  Using 'predict' feature in a static threshold allows you to receive a predictive alert when an attribute with fixed-capacity is approaching its limit.  This is very useful for attributes such as disk space utilization.

As a decision maker, you will need to determine if you need to combine static thresholds and dynamic thresholds to add more flexibility to your thresholds.  If so, you will also need to decide which way to go: to add dynamic adjustment to a static threshold, or to add static adjustment to a dynamic threshold.