About Activity

The Activity overview screen lists alerts and other notifications about activities occurring in your cloud environment. You can filter, sort, and expand areas of the screen to refine how information is displayed. Links within activity details enable you to view additional information about specific resources listed.

Screen components

You can use the screen areas shown below to monitor and interpret Activity data.

The default Activity view shows all active notifications. Use the filters and date range selectors on the Filters menu bar to filter all stored notifications.

You can also click the icon to expand (or collapse) the filter banner, which contains the same selection choices in a vertical presentation.

About alerts

The appliance uses alert messages to report issues with the resources it manages. The resources generate alerts to notify you that some meaningful event occurred and that an action might be required.

An event is a single, low-level problem or change that occurred on a resource. Usually, events are detected by an agent running either on the resource or on the appliance.

Each alert includes the following information about the event it reports: severity, state, description, and urgency. You can clear alerts, assign owners to alerts, and add notes to alerts.

While alerts have an active or locked state, they contribute to a resource’s overall displayed status. After you change their state to Cleared, they no longer affect the displayed status.


	IMPORTANT: The appliance keeps a running count of incoming alerts. At intervals of 500 alert messages, the appliance determines if the number of alerts has reached 75,000. When it does, an auto-cleanup occurs, which deletes alert messages until the total number is fewer than 74,200. When the auto-cleanup runs, it first removes the oldest cleared alerts. Then it deletes the oldest alerts by severity.

About tasks

All user-initiated tasks are reported as activities. User-initiated tasks are created when a user adds, creates, removes, updates, or deletes resources.

The Activity screen provides a valuable source of monitoring and troubleshooting information that you can use to resolve an issue. You can determine the type of task performed, whether the task was completed, when the task was completed, and who initiated the task.

IMPORTANT: The appliance maintains a task database that holds information for approximately six months or 50,000 tasks. If the task database exceeds 50,000 tasks within the six-month period, the oldest blocks of 500 tasks are deleted until the count is fewer than 50,000. Tasks older than six months are removed from the database.

The task database and the database that stores alerts are separate.

About the Activity sidebar

The Activity sidebar shows tasks initiated during the current session. The most recent task is displayed first.

Task notifications provide information (including in-progress, error, and completion messages) about tasks that were launched.

The Activity sidebar differs from the Activity screen because it displays only recent activity. The Activity screen, in contrast, displays all activities and allows you to list, sort, and filter them. For more information, see About Activity.

Click an activity to show more details.

Activity states

Activity	State	Description
Alert	Active	The alert has not been cleared or resolved. A resource’s active alerts are considered in the resource’s overall health status. Active alerts contribute to the alert count summary.
	Locked	An `Active` alert that was set (locked) by an internal resource manager. You cannot manually clear a `Locked` alert. Examine the corrective action associated with an alert to determine how to fix the problem. After the problem is fixed, the resource manager moves the alert to the `Active` state. At that time, you can clear the alert. A resource’s locked alerts contribute to its overall status.
	Cleared	The alert was addressed, noted, or resolved. You clear an activity when it no longer needs to be tracked. The appliance clears certain activities automatically. The appliance clears certain activities automatically. `Cleared` activities do not affect the resource’s health status and they are not counted in the displayed summaries.
Task	Completed	The task started and ran to completion.
	Running	The task has started and is running, but has not yet completed.
	Pending	The task has not yet run.
	Interrupted	The task ran, but was interrupted. For example, it could be waiting for a resource
	Error	A task failed or generated a `Critical` alert. Investigate `Error` states immediately.
	Warning	An event occurred that might require your attention. A warning can mean that something is not correct within the appliance. Investigate `Warning` states immediately.

Activity statuses

Status	Description
Critical	A critical alert message was received, or a task failed or was interrupted. Investigate `Critical` status activities immediately.
Warning	An event occurred that might require your attention. A warning can mean that something is not correct within the appliance and it needs your attention. Investigate `Warning` status activities immediately.
OK	For an alert, `OK` indicates normal behavior or information from a resource. For a task, `OK` indicates that it completed successfully.
Unknown	The status of the alert or task is unknown. The status of a task that is set to run at a later time is `Unknown`.
Disabled	A task was prevented from continuing or completing.

See also

Activity