Incident Flood Control

Prior to Enterprise Manager Release 12.1.0.4, there was no limit to the number of diagnostic incidents recorded for a single problem in Incident Manager. It is conceivable that a problem could generate dozens or perhaps hundreds of incidents in a short period of time. While incidents generated during the early stages of a problem may be useful, after a certain point the excess diagnostic data would provide little value and possibly slow down your efforts to diagnose and resolve the problem. Because diagnostic problems typically tend to be long-lived, a significant number of incidents could be generated over time. Also, depending on the size of your monitored environment, the diagnostic data may consume considerable system resources.

For these reasons, the Enterprise Manager applies flood control limits on the number of diagnostic incidents that can be raised for a given problem in Incident Manager. Flood-controlled incidents provide a way of informing you that a critical error is ongoing, without overloading the system with diagnostic data.

Beginning with Enterprise Manager Release 12.1.0.4, two limits are placed on the number of diagnostic incidents that can be raised for a given problem in Incident Manager. A problem is identified by a unique problem signature called a problem key and is associated with a single target.

Enterprise Manager Limits on Diagnostic Incidents

Enterprise Manager enforces two limits for diagnostic incidents:

For any given hour, Enterprise Manager only records up to five (default value) diagnostic incidents for a given target and problem key combination.
On any given day, Enterprise Manager only records up to 25 (default value) diagnostic incidents for a given problem key and target combination.

When either of these limits is reached, any diagnostic incidents for the same target/problem key combination will not be recorded until the corresponding hour or day is over. Diagnostic incident recording will commence once a new hour or day begins.

Note:

Hour and day calculations are based on UTC (or GMT).

These diagnostic incident limits only apply to Incident Manager and not to the underlying ADR. All incidents continue to be recorded in the ADR repository. Using Enterprise Manager Support Workbench, users can view all the incidents for a given problem at any time and take appropriate actions.

Enterprise Manager diagnostic incident limits are configurable. As mentioned earlier, the defaults for these two limits are set to 5 incidents per hour and 25 incidents per day. These defaults should not be changed unless there is a clear business reason to track all diagnostic incidents.

Changing Enterprise Manager Diagnostic Incident Limits

To update the diagnostic limits, execute the following SQL against the Enterprise Manager repository as the SYSMAN user using the appropriate limit values as shown in the following example.

The PL/SQL shown in the following example prints out the current limits.

Note:

The Enterprise Manager incident limits are in addition to any diagnostic incident limits imposed by underlying applications such as Oracle database, Middleware and Fusion Applications. These limits are specific to each application. See the respective application documentation for more information.

Example 5-3 SQL Used to Change Diagnostic Incident Limits

exec  EM_EVENT_UTIL.SET_ADR_INC_LIMITS(5,25);

Example 5-4 SQL Used to Print Out Current Diagnostic Incident Limits

DECLARE
  l_adr_hour_limit NUMBER;
  l_adr_day_limit NUMBER;
BEGIN
      em_event_util. GET_ADR_INC_LIMITS
              (p_hourly_limit => l_adr_hour_limit,
               p_daily_limit => l_adr_day_limit);
      dbms_output.put_line(l_adr_hour_limit || '-' || l_adr_day_limit);
END;