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Documentation for Integration Plumbers products.

Alerts and thresholds

The plug-in ships curated WARNING and CRITICAL thresholds. They are enabled the moment a target is created — there is nothing to import and nothing to switch on — and every one of them is editable per target in the Enterprise Manager console.

Prerequisites for this page

  • A target that is collecting. Thresholds are live from the moment the target exists, but they cannot fire on a metric that has never collected.
  • Enterprise Manager access to Metric and Collection Settings, to change any of them.

In this page: What ships enabled · The thresholds · Changing a threshold · Applying settings across many targets · Why some thresholds have only a critical value

What ships enabled

Fourteen thresholds ship with the plug-in, spread across availability, space, performance, backup, high availability and licensing. They are defaults, not recommendations for your estate: they are set where a value is unambiguously worth waking someone for, and they are deliberately conservative so a new target does not flood you on day one.

The plug-in does not ship an Enterprise Manager Monitoring Template. A template is a separate artifact that an administrator applies across many targets at once, usually with different values for production, test and development. If you want that, you build it from these defaults — see Applying settings across many targets below.

The thresholds

What it watches Metric column Warning Critical Fires when
Instance availability Response Status — 1 The instance is down
Database free space DbFreespace free_pct 15 5 Free space falls below the percentage
Host CPU Processor cpu_utilization_pct 80 90 CPU utilisation exceeds the percentage
AG replica link AgFailoverReadiness link_healthy — 1 The replica link is broken
AG redo queue AgFailoverReadiness redo_queue_kb 1048576 5242880 The redo queue exceeds the size in KB
AG send queue AgFailoverReadiness log_send_queue_kb 1048576 5242880 The send queue exceeds the size in KB
AG recovery point AgFailoverReadiness rpo_seconds 300 900 The recovery point exceeds the seconds
Backup age LastDatabaseBackup hours_since_last_backup 48 168 No backup within the hours
Transaction log TransactionLog log_space_used_pct 75 90 Log space used exceeds the percentage
Licence License days_remaining 30 7 Fewer days remain on the licence
Deadlocks DeadlockRate deadlocks_last_hour 5 20 Deadlocks in the trailing hour exceed the count
Blocking BlockedSessions blocked_sessions 5 20 Blocked requests exceed the count
Connection saturation ConnectionSaturation connection_saturation_pct 80 90 User connections exceed the percentage of the cap
TempDB contention TempdbContention pagelatch_ex_waiters 5 20 Exclusive page-latch waiters exceed the count

The License row watches days_remaining, but the metric also carries a Status column — Active, License Required, Invalid Signature, Wrong Product, Expired or Exceeded Limit — and raises its own CRITICAL incident whenever that status is anything but Active, independently of the days-remaining threshold above. See the Open Beta notice for what each status means and what to do about it.

For metrics measured as a snapshot rather than a rate, use Enterprise Manager’s per-threshold number of occurrences setting to require a condition to persist before it raises an incident. A single sample of high blocking is often noise; the same value across three consecutive collections is not.

Changing a threshold

From the target’s menu, choose Monitoring then Metric and Collection Settings. Every threshold above appears there with its shipped value, and any change applies to that target only.

When a threshold is crossed, the incident appears in Enterprise Manager and on the target’s own Overview page:

The Incidents and Problems region of the Overview page listing open incidents with their severity, status and age

Collection intervals are set in the same place. They range from one minute for instance availability to 24 hours for server configuration and per-database space, so a metric you have just changed may not reflect it until its next collection.

Applying settings across many targets

Because the plug-in ships defaults rather than a template, estate-wide tuning is done with Enterprise Manager’s own template mechanism:

  1. Tune one target until its thresholds match your standard.
  2. From Enterprise → Monitoring → Monitoring Templates, create a template from that target.
  3. Apply the template to the targets or target group you want it on.

This keeps the plug-in’s defaults as a sane starting point while letting you hold production and development to different standards.

Why some thresholds have only a critical value

Two of the fourteen, instance availability and the AG replica link, have a critical value and no warning. That is deliberate: they are binary conditions. An instance is up or down; a replica link is healthy or broken. There is no middle state worth a lower severity, and inventing one would only produce an alert nobody can act on differently.

The AG replica link threshold is also deliberately not placed on the readiness column. A healthy asynchronous-commit disaster-recovery secondary sits permanently in a synchronising state, so alerting on readiness would raise a standing critical on a perfectly correct topology. Replication lag is covered instead by the redo queue, send queue and recovery-point thresholds above, which measure how far behind the replica actually is.

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