You will need to install Oracle SOA Suite and the Hyperic HQ server and agents for this recipe. Both Hyperic HQ and Oracle SOA Suite will need to be running. You will also need the login credentials for the Hyperic HQ console. Hyperic will need to be configured with working e-mail settings to be able to send out alert e-mails.

We can set up alerts in Hyperic by following these steps:

Alerts are generated by the server when it receives metrics from agents. It filters the stream of incoming metrics and checks whether any will cause an alert to fire. So, depending upon how frequently agents are gathering metrics and reporting them to the server, it may take a few minutes before an alert is fired. When an alert is triggered, the associated actions are processed, which will normally involve sending e-mails to users or mailing lists, and possibly notifying Hyperic HQ users via their dashboards.

In this recipe, we configured a simple e-mail notification, although it is possible to have more complex actions, especially if you wish to write a custom action plugin. One of the most common actions to perform is to raise an SNMP event to a corporate-level incident management system, which can be accomplished by using the OpenNMS action. Hyperic has a plugin-based architecture, so it is possible to produce almost any other notification methods if you wish.

The fact that alerts are generated on the server side means you need to give yourself sufficient time to be able to react to a condition, although it is still necessary to avoid false positives. This means that setting the alert thresholds can be quite a complex task, which may require several iterations to get it correct.

In addition setting alerts on metric conditions, it is also possible to set them up for configuration changes or errors being logged to a log file.

For more information about configuring alerts, see the Hyperic documentation at https://support.hyperic.com/display/DOC/Defining+Alerts.