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Avoid false alerts triggered because of backups, upgrades...

Blackout KM for PATROL®

Blackout KM for PATROL® is a tool intended for BMC Software® PATROL® administrators. It helps them dramatically reduce the number of triggered alerts. It simply makes PATROL® enter into maintenance mode during backups and other maintenance operations (upgrades, etc.). The Blackout KM prevents PATRO®L from raising alerts that are directly or indirectly caused by such maintenance operations (stopped processes, high disk usage, etc.).

The Blackout KM by Sentry Software is the most powerful and comprehensive blackout solution available on the market: easy-to-use graphical interface in PATROL®, seamless integration with existing backup scripts, etc. Please read below to see how the Blackout KM will greatly improve the efficiency of your monitoring architecture!


Key Features
  • Temporarily black out a whole KM or a single object
  • Plan periodic blackouts to handle backup operations: daily, weekly or monthly
  • Plan "one shot" blackouts to handle maintenance operations
  • Trigger a blackout upon the start/stop of a process, service, or file presence
  • Near real-time precision!
  • Completely disable monitoring or only disable alert thresholds
  • Control blackouts from an external scheduler or from your backup scripts
Key Benefits
  • Avoid false alerts triggered by maintenance operations (backups, upgrades, etc.)
  • Help your operators stop wasting their time sorting out real problems from false alerts
  • Improve the efficiency of your monitoring solution and have more time to fix real problems
  • Maximize the availability of your IT infrastructure by improving the accuracy of your PATROL®-based monitoring solution
Your Challenge - Our Solution
Following your IT infrastructure’s day-to-day life
Your IT infrastructure has become a critical component for your business. That’s why you actively monitor it to ensure its full availability. You also backup your databases, files, e-mails and configurations, while upgrading the software components as necessary.

This kind of maintenance activity (backups and software upgrades) often implies taking various IT components offline and triggering high system resource usage. While these maintenance operations are part of normal IT day-to-day life, if they are not properly handled by your monitoring solution, this raises alerts each time a server is backed-up or upgraded!

False alerts caused by maintenance operations
Assuming that your IT infrastructure is well designed and properly doing its job, the false alerts due to maintenance operations (backups, upgrades, etc.) may represent up to 100% of the daily alerts sent by PATROL to operators and administrators.

False alerts impact
Ask your operators: every morning they face hundreds of alerts simply because of backup operations! Each time an administrator works on a server (software upgrades, configuration changes, etc.), he basically lights up the Christmas tree in terms of operator consoles. As a result, operators are up to their sleeves in false alerts and they can’t see the real problems that have occurred during the night.

Our solution
Sentry Software has developed the Blackout KM for PATROL as a standard certified BMC Software® MarketZone product. It allows you to have your favorite monitoring tool enter maintenance mode, preventing it from raising hundreds of false alerts about a planned backup that is running just fine! With Blackout KM for PATROL by Sentry Software, you dramatically reduce the number of false alerts that your operators have to process and that prevent them from treating real problems!
Typical Customer Case

The following is an example of a 100 server infrastructure monitored with BMC Software® PATROL®. Every night, most of the servers are backed-up, including databases, file servers, e-mails, etc. As well, this is a case where an application upgrade is performed by a server administrator.

Most of the alerts received by operators deal with nightly backups. Simply from these backups, operators can receive more than 30 alarms per hour (unavailable databases, stopped processes, etc.) Such alerts shouldn’t disturb operators since they are normal consequences of the backup process.

When you install and configure Blackout KM for PATROL, you can tell the PATROL Agents not to send alerts to operators during backups or maintenance operations. Thanks to Blackout KM for PATROL, operators won’t have to face 150 alerts every morning when they open their consoles.
Screenshots Gallery
PATROL Environment
Blackout KM for PATROL is "BMC Software MarketZone Product" certified. It supports and is supported by the following components in the PATROL framework:

Monitoring:
  • PATROL Agent (required) - 3.4.11, 3.5, 3.6
Viewing:
  • PATROL Classic Console - 3.4.11, 3.5, 3.6
  • PATROL Central - Windows Edition - 7.2+
  • PATROL Central - Web Edition - 7.2+
PATROL Infrastructure:
  • Installation Utility (Thorium) - 7.4.60, 7.5.20 and greater
  • PATROL Distribution Server
  • PATROL Configuration Manager - 1.4+
  • Console Server - 7.2+
Monitoring consolidation:
  • PATROL Reporting
  • PATROL Enterprise Manager
  • BMC Enterprise Manager
  • BMC Impact Manager
  • Any solution supporting the PATROL API
Real-time?
Sentry Software has implemented an innovative near real-time engine in the Blackout KM. What does it mean?
The Blackout KM detects in less than 5 seconds the creations and deletions of files, processes and NT services that control the start and stop of a blackout.
Example
Let's say that you want to make PATROL enter maintenance mode from within your backup scripts. Basically, you setup a blackout that will run while the /backupIsRunning file is present. You also have to modify your backup script to:
- create the /backupIsRunning file before taking down the databases and starting the backup,
- remove this file when the backup is done.
In such example, the Blackout KM instantaneously detects the /backupIsRunning file and pauses the monitoring.
Why is this so important?
If the file was simply polled every 2 minutes like it usually done by most monitoring tools, you would be getting false alerts for the first 2 minutes at the most and you might miss 2 minutes of monitoring at the end of the blackout.

Customer Question

Are we missing alerts with Blackout KM for PATROL ?

- First, when you set up a blackout, you do not have to completely disable the monitoring of a server. You can pause the monitoring of only the parameters that you know trigger an alert for every backup.

- Second, once the blackout is over, the suspended parameters are resumed. Therefore, if something is going wrong after the blackout period, an alert will be raised and you won't miss any critical problem.

 Related Documents


The Blackout KM for PATROL has been certified BMC Software MarketZone product by VeriTest.