Enhancing System Monitoring with Barbara’s Alert Manager

What is the Alert Manager?

The Alert Manager is a robust Marketplace application designed to monitor your system in real-time, identify potential issues, and notify relevant users when predefined thresholds are breached. It continuously evaluates the status of services, system telemetry, and external variables, ensuring that no anomalies go unnoticed.

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Key Functionalities

1. Real-Time Monitoring: Continuously tracks services, edge node’s telemetry data, and configured variables to maintain system integrity.
2. Configurable Alerts: Allows you to define custom thresholds for various metrics to trigger alerts tailored to your needs.
3. Multi-Channel Notifications: Supports both MQTT and email notifications for flexible and reliable alert delivery.
4. Integration Capabilities: Offers seamless integration with other tools and systems, expanding its monitoring reach.
5. Health Checks: Ensures that both the application and its dependencies are functioning optimally.

How the Alert Manager Works

The Alert Manager operates across three primary areas of system monitoring:

1. Service Monitoring

The application periodically checks the status of configured services. Each service is monitored based on user-defined parameters:

• Interval: The time (in seconds) between health checks.
• Retries: The number of recovery attempts before triggering an alert.

If a service is unresponsive after the set retries, the system generates an alert. This ensures prompt action for service disruptions.

2. Edge Node’s Telemetry

The telemetry module monitors the edge node’s telemetry parameters every 60 seconds, comparing it to two thresholds:

• Warning Threshold: Sends a warning when some parameter exceeds a predefined percentage (e.g., 75%).
• Critical Threshold: Triggers a critical alert when some parameter surpasses a higher level (e.g., 90%).

By proactively managing telemetry parameters as disk space, etc. the Alert Manager helps prevent performance bottlenecks and outages.

3. External Variables via API

The Alert Manager provides a REST API endpoint for external systems to submit variable data.This feature enables monitoring of custom metrics and conditions that are critical to your specific operations. When a variable’s value meets predefined criteria (e.g., exceeding a threshold), an alert is triggered.

Configuration and Customization

The Alert Manager is highly configurable, allowing users to tailor it to their unique requirements. Configuration is managed through a JSON file, which defines key settings such as:

.- Notification Preferences: Enables/disables email and MQTT notifications, sets recipients, and schedules summary reports.

.- Telemetry Limits: Defines warning and critical thresholds for disk usage.

.- Service Monitoring: Specifies which services to monitor, their check intervals, and retry attempts.

.- External Variables: Configures thresholds and conditions for external data.

Benefits of Using the Alert Manager on the Barbara Platform

When deployed on Barbara´s Edge Orchestration Platform, the Alert Manager becomes an even more powerful tool. Here’s why:

1. Seamless Integration with Edge Nodes

Barbara’s platform enables easy deployment and management of the Alert Manager across multiple edge nodes. With its centralized management capabilities, you can deploy, configure, and monitor the application from a unified interface.

2. High Scalability

Barbara’s architecture is designed for scalability, allowing the Alert Manager to function effectively across distributed environments. Whether you’re monitoring a handful of devices or thousands of edge nodes, the system adapts to your needs.

3. Enhanced Security

Barbara’s edge platform prioritizes security, ensuring that your monitoring and alerting processes are safeguarded against vulnerabilities. The Alert Manager’s integration with secure communication protocols like MQTT 3.1.1 aligns perfectly with Barbara’s stringent security standards.

4. Marketplace Ecosystem

The Barbara Marketplace provides access to a rich library of applications, including the Alert Manager. This ecosystem simplifies the process of finding and deploying complementary tools, enhancing the functionality of your edge infrastructure.

Conclusion

The Alert Manager is an indispensable application for maintaining the reliability and performance of edge systems. By continuously monitoring services, telemetry, and external variables, it empowers users to address potential issues proactively. When combined with Barbara platform, the Alert Manager delivers unparalleled ease of deployment, scalability, and security.

Ready to take your system monitoring to the next level? Alert Manager is now available in Barbara’s Marketplace and is accessible to all users with just a basic license.

Don’t wait to optimize your edge nodes system. Explore the Alert Manager in the Marketplace now!

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