Incident Suppression, Enrichment, and Dampening

NNMi provides a rich feature set for getting the most value from incidents. For each incident type, you can specifically define when an incident is of interest with the following incident configuration options:

• Suppression—When an incident matches the suppression configuration, that incident does not appear in the NNMi console incident views. Incident suppression is useful for incidents (for example, SNMPLinkDown traps) that are important for some nodes (for example routers and switches) but not others.
• Enrichment—When an incident matches the enrichment configuration, NNMi changes one or more incident values (for example, severity or message) according to the contents of the incident. Incident enrichment is useful for processing traps (for example, RMONFallingAlarm) that carry the distinguishing information in the trap varbinds (payload).
• Dampening—When an incident matches the dampening configuration, NNMi delays activity for that incident for the duration of the dampen interval. Incident dampening provides time for the NNMi Causal Engine to perform root cause analysis on the incident, which is useful for providing fewer, more meaningful incidents in the NNMi console.

For each incident type NNMi provides the following levels of configuration for suppression, enrichment, and dampening:

• Interface group settings—Specify incident behavior when the source object is a member of an NNMi interface group. You can specify different behavior for each interface group.
• Node group settings—Specify incident behavior when the source object is a member of an NNMi node group. You can specify different behavior for each node group.
• Default settings—Specify default incident behavior.

For each incident configuration area (suppression, enrichment, and dampening), NNMi uses the following procedure to determine the behavior of a specific incident:

1. Check the interface group settings:

   • If the source object matches any interface group settings, carry out the behavior defined in the match with the lowest ordering number and stop looking for a match.
   • If the source object does not match any interface group settings, continue with step 2.

2. Check the node group settings:

   • If the source object matches any node group settings, carry out the behavior defined in the match with the lowest ordering number and stop looking for a match.
   • If the source object does not match any node group settings, continue with step 3.
3. Carry out the behavior defined in the default settings, if any.