Designing and Managing Behavior Models - NerveCenter Severities - Creating a New Severity -
Default Severities      Creating Custom Colors

Creating a New Severity

If your behavior models require severities other than those supplied with NerveCenter, you can create new severities.

 
  To create a new severity:

1. From the client's Admin menu, choose Severity List.

   The Severity List window is displayed. This window presents information about all the severities currently defined in the NerveCenter database.

   

2. Select the New button in the Severity List window.

   The New Severity window is displayed.

   

3. Enter a unique name for your severity in the Severity Name field.

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      The maximum length for severity names is 255 characters.

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4. Enter a unique severity level, an integer in the range 0 to 255, in the Severity Level field.

   Since the predefined severities use the levels 0 through 12, you should avoid those numbers (unless you've modified the levels of the predefined severities).

   In general, you should set up your severity levels so that the lowest priority severities have the lowest levels and the highest priority severities have the highest levels. This is true because if NerveCenter is set up to forward information about important alarm transitions to a network management platform, NerveCenter forwards information about any transition whose destination state has a severity whose level is greater than or equal to x, where x is defined when NerveCenter is configured.

5. Enter the name of a severity group in the Severity Group field.

   This group can be one of the preexisting groups -- Fault or Traffic -- or a user-defined group. In either case, the severity group should indicate the type of problem that the severity reflects.

6. In the Platform Name field, enter the name of a severity on your network management platform, or if you're not using a network management platform, leave the value set to "Unknown."

   When you enter a platform severity name, you establish a mapping between the NerveCenter severity you're defining and a severity on your network management platform. For example, the predefined NerveCenter severity VeryHigh (traffic) is mapped by default to the platform severity Normal. Given this situation, if NerveCenter informs a platform of a condition of VeryHigh severity, the platform will indicate (in its event browser) that an event of Normal severity has occurred.

7. Assign a color to the severity.

   To assign this color, perform the following steps:

   1. Select the Change Color button in the New Severity window.

      The Color window is displayed.

      

   2. Select the color box containing the color you want to assign to the severity.
   3. Select the OK button in the Color window.
8. Select the Save button in the New Severity window.

   Information about the new severity is saved to the NerveCenter database.