CustomPolicyEngined
The Oracle Communications Unified Assurance Event Custom Action Policy Engine (CAPE) is a policy-based, multithreaded, multi-headed, and flexible correlation engine. You can configure it to run a variety of custom tasks on the event stream before other actions are taken. CAPE allows for post-collection processing for enrichment and correlation outside of the database environment. You can use a variety of connectors (Generic Connector, Ticketing Connectors, Probable Root Cause Analysis), agents (time of day correlation, time of day, existence or absence of events) and internal or external datasets to create custom correlation models. Use CAPE to integrate Unified Assurance with an external ticketing system, enrich and correlate data, implement custom notifications, and perform automatic remediation.
A CAPE implementation consists of two pieces:
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A CAPE policy polls the Event database for matching events to select the data that will be processed by the node, and applies other settings needed to process the returned data.
You can cluster CAPE policies across multiple running CAPE services, or you can run them from a specific CAPE service by setting the zone ID on the policy and application configuration. For load balancing clustering, set the Failover Type service setting to Cluster on the CAPE service.
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A CAPE node contains the Perl-based logic needed to process the data that was retrieved by the policy. It runs when a CAPE policy detects an event that matches its criteria.
You can chain CAPE nodes to run in sequence by setting a condition in the Next Node Condition field and selecting the node to run if condition is true. You can also set aliases for nodes and call them as functions from within another node's code for more complex decision trees.
You can run this application as a service using the Services UI.
Custom Action Policy Engine (CAPE) Setup
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Create CAPE nodes or modify existing CAPE nodes.
See Nodes in Unified Assurance User's Guide for information about the UI for creating and modifying CAPE nodes.
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Create CAPE policies or modify existing CAPE policies.
See Policies in Unified Assurance User's Guide for information about the UI for creating and modifying CAPE policies.
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Create a custom CAPE service or enable the default CAPE service.
See Services in Unified Assurance User's Guide for information about the UI for creating and enabling services.
For detailed examples of creating CAPE policies and corresponding nodes, see Configuring Custom Actions with CAPE Policies.
Default Service
The following table shows the settings for the default CAPE service. Actual values are in bold, descriptions of values are in plaintext.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Package | coreProcessing-app |
| Name | Event Custom Action Policy Engine (CAPE) |
| Program | bin/core/processing/CustomPolicyEngined |
| Arguments | This field is blank. There is no default value. |
| Description | Daemon runs custom policies which run custom nodes |
| Failover Type | Standalone (Supported: Standalone, Primary, Redundant/Backup, Cluster) |
| Status | Disabled |
| Privileged | This option is selected. |
See Services in Unified Assurance User's Guide for general information about the settings for services.
See Using Application Primary/Backup Failover and Using Application Clustering for more information about the different failover types.
Default Configuration
The following table shows the additional default configuration settings for the CAPE service. Actual values are in bold, descriptions of values are in plaintext.
| Name | Default Value | Possible Values | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| CheckTime | 900 | An integer | How often (in seconds) the application checks for new and removes old policies. |
| LogFile | logs/EventCustomPolicyEngine.log | Text, 255 characters | The relative path to the CAPE log file. |
| LogLevel | ERROR | OFF, FATAL, ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG | The logging level for the application. |
| ShardID | 1 | An integer | The Event database shard to use. Use 0 to read from all shards. |
| Threads | 3 | An integer | The number of process threads created. |
| DeviceZoneID | This field is blank. There is no default value. | The name of any available device or CAPE zone. | (Optional) The device zone or custom CAPE zone to run policies within. If not specified, All Zones is used. |
About CAPE Node Rules
CAPE Nodes are written in Perl syntax. For information about creating nodes, see the following in Unified Assurance Developer's Guide:
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Core for information about core rules functions.
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Events for information about Event rules functions.
About CAPE Tokens
CAPE exposes the tokens described in the following table for node processing.
| Token | Description |
|---|---|
| $AppConfig | Hash reference to the application configuration name-value pairs that were configured. (i.e. use $AppConfig->{'Host'} to retrieve the set value for 'Host'.) |
| $CustomHash | Custom key, value cache available across all nodes. Contents commonly defined in the first node of a policy and then used throughout the nodes. NOTE: This variable is a shared object and any additional sub hashes or arrays must be shared before use or it will cause the error: Invalid value for shared scalar. Instantiate the sub hash/array using '&share({})' e.g. $CustomHash->{SubObject} = &share({}); |
| $EventData | Resulting data from Policy. Use $EventData->{'FieldName'} to access the FieldName data. When processing multiple events together, this is a hash of events keyed by the order it was returned from the query. Each row contains the reserved data field ShardID which is the ShardID it was read from. |
| $EventDBH | Events Database Handle connected to configured shard. Usable by nodes to make updates, read additional information, etc. If ShardID is 0, this will be ShardID 1 only. |
| $StorageHash | Internal cache used as the StorageHash option when calling functions such as FindDeviceID(). NOTE: The structure of this cache is subject to change! Not recommended for custom global storage or manual manipulation; use $CustomHash. |
Administration Details
The following list shows the technical details you will need for advanced administration of the application:
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Package: coreProcessing-app
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Synopsis:
./CustomPolicyEngined [OPTIONS] -
Options:
-c, --AppConfigID N AppConfigID => Application Config ID (Service, Job, or Request ID) -?, -h, --Help Print usage and exit -
Threaded: Multithreaded