Filter
Top Products
12-2
User Guide for Cisco Secure Access Control System 5.3
OL-24201-01
Chapter 12 Managing Alarms
Understanding Alarms
System Alarms
System alarms notify you of critical conditions encountered during the execution of the ACS Monitoring
and Reporting viewer. System alarms also provide informational status of system activities, such as data
purge events or failure of the log collector to populate the View database.
You cannot configure system alarms, which are predefined. However, you do have the option to disable
system alarms or decide how you want to be notified if you have enabled them.
This section contains the following topics:
• Evaluating Alarm Thresholds, page 12-2
• Notifying Users of Events, page 12-3
Evaluating Alarm Thresholds
ACS evaluates the threshold conditions based on a schedule. You define these schedules and, while
creating a threshold, you assign a schedule to it. A schedule consists of one or more continuous or
noncontinuous periods of time during the week.
For example, you can create a schedule that is active from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through
Friday. See Understanding Alarm Schedules, page 12-9 for more information. When you assign this
schedule to a threshold, ACS evaluates the threshold and generates alarms only during the active period.
ACS evaluates the thresholds periodically depending on the number of thresholds that are currently
enabled.
Table 12-1 provides the length of the evaluation cycle for a given number of thresholds.
When an evaluation cycle begins, ACS evaluates each enabled threshold one after another. If the
schedule associated with the threshold allows the threshold to be executed, ACS evaluates the threshold
conditions. An alarm is triggered if the condition is met. See Creating, Editing, and Duplicating Alarm
Thresholds, page 12-11 for more information.
Note System alarms do not have an associated schedule and are sent immediately after they occur. You can
only enable or disable system alarms as a whole.
Table 12-1 Evaluation Cycle of Alarm Thresholds
Number of Enabled Thresholds Evaluation Cycle
1
1. If the time taken to evaluate the thresholds increase, then the evaluation cycle increases from 2 to 3 minutes, 3 to 5 minutes, and from 5 to 15 minutes.
The evaluation cycle time is reset to 2, 3, and 5 minutes every 12 hours.
1 to 20 Every 2 minutes
21 to 50 Every 3 minutes
51 to 100 Every 5 minutes