Creating Actions and Action Policies

Action policies allow you to define site policy by triggering actions or groups of actions to occur in response to change of state events on your managed network hosts, applications, and infrastructure.

For example, some examples of site action policies might be:

• Starting up a backup host device when a primary fails
• Restarting a critical service (an FTP or logging server, for example)
• Notifying application management engineers when devices transition state (for example from maintenance mode to up)

Guidelines and Workflow for Creating Action Policies

Begin by creating a list or matrix of critical state change events, appropriate actions, and the chain of responsible individuals for your site.

Example

1. Create an Action type from the Actions Library.

   Example

   1. Click the new button, then select PowerShell (for Linux/UNIX, select SSH).
   2. Add syntax for remote login to the device in the script text box.
2. Create the Action Policy.

   Example

   • Add a notification action you created according to your site's notification hierarchy.
   • Add the PowerShell action you created.

Available Action Types

There are three action types you can apply in response to network, host device, and application events.

• Notifications. Send messages to stakeholders and responsible individuals according to site policy.
• Remote execution. Create scripts, execute remote programs, and apply configuration changes.
• Log. Include state change observed by WhatsUp Gold in platform logs.

Notifications	Remote Execution	Log
SMS, SMS Direct, Email, Beeper, Pager, Web Alarm, Text to Speech, Sound.	SSH, PowerShell, Active Script, Program, WhatsConfigured, Service Restart, SNMP Set.	Syslog, VMware, Windows Event Log

See Also Configuring the WhatsUp Gold Application Running Discovery Working with Credentials Grouping Devices Creating Monitors Creating Alerts Configuring Application Monitoring Performance Tuning Polling Activity WhatsUp Gold Settings Customizing the My Network Map