New Cloverleaf Functionality – Alerts

The Infor (formerly Lawson, formerly Healthvision, formerly…) folks have given us some nice enhancements to the alert functionality starting with version 5.8 of Cloverleaf (what I’m describing here is based on Windows version 5.8.5).

In recent memory, Cloverleaf has been able to automatically generate alerts under a variety of scenarios. Unfortunately, the built-in alert actions that displayed a message on the console or placed a message in the log/error files were not terribly useful. Sending automatic emails on Windows was challenging. The latest Cloverleaf makes the emailing much easier and adds some useful functionality.

Here is a list of my favorite alerts:

Alert Type	Send an alert when:
Thread status	A thread is up or down (or opening) for specified period of time
Error count	A thread has more than X errors
Outbound queue depth	More than X messages are queued up waiting to be sent
Last send	The last message we sent was more than X seconds ago
Disk % full	Just like it sounds
Last receive	The last message we received was more than X seconds ago
System CPU %	Just like it sounds
File change	A file is updated
Transactions/sec	A thread is processing > or < X transactions/second
Idle CPU %	CPU has less than X % idle for Y minutes

To assist with automatic email alerts, there’s a tool under Options, Site Options, Alert Configuration. It enables you to test connectivity with your mail server. The only gotcha with this is that when we ran the test, it told us the test had completed successfully but when we tried the alerts, the email didn’t go through. We had to change the settings on our Exchange connector to allow for unauthenticated or anonymous connections from the Cloverleaf server.

Fittingly enough, the default file for the alert configuration is called “default.alrt”. You can change this under the “Site Daemons” by using the “Alert Cfg” button but I’ve never bothered with that. I have a feeling that if you did change it, you’d have to restart the Monitor Daemon for it to take effect. Unlike other configuration settings in Cloverleaf, the alerts take effect as soon as you save the alert file. Not like the NetConfig, where you have to bounce a thread or process for it to become active.

There is a file called “alerts.log” that is useful for troubleshooting. Cloverleaf adds an entry to this file each time an alert fires. This file is in your site directory under exec\hcimonitord.

Here is an example of an outbound queue depth alert that will notify us when two or more messages have been queued up for at least a minute:

Note the %N references

Here are guidelines for setting up some of the common alerts:

Alert Type	Source	Source Count	Comparing	Comparing Blank	Duration
Thread status		any	!=	up	N min (usually use 1 for 1 minute)
Protocol status		any	!=	up	N min (usually use 1 for 1 minute)
Error count
Outbound queue depth		any	>=	# of messages	N min (usually use 1 for 1 minute)
Last send		Any	>=	# of seconds	N min (usually use 1 for 1 minute)
Disk % full	Drive to monitor	all	>=	% e.g. 80	Once
Last receive		Any	>=	# of seconds	N min (usually use 1 for 1 minute)
System CPU %
File change
Transactions/sec
Idle CPU %		All	<=	% (e.g. 5)	N min (e.g. 5)

 

The Alert Time Window used to have some “gotchas but now they’ve reworked it, so you don’t have to remember that 0 means Sunday.

Automatically Bouncing a Thread

The screen shot above shows an example of stopping and restarting a thread automatically. Thread_Restart.bat is a generic .bat file I created that allows us to pass the site, process and thread names so it can be reused. Contact me if you’d like a copy of the file by calling:

Jeff Robbins
Dynamic Health IT, Inc.
504-309-9103

or visit our Contact Us page.

Dynamic Health IT offers Cloverleaf Interface Development and Consulting.