Grass Valley Profile XP Service Manual - Manual (Page 135)

Configuring messages
23 July 2004 Profile XP Service Manual 135
Configuring messages
Monitoring station initiated messages are controlled from within the NetCentral
software. An example of this type of message is when the Profile XP system responds
to the NetCentral software’s heartbeat polling. You can configure heartbeat polling as
explained in the next section.
Device initiated messages are controlled on each device. This type of message is sent
when a threshold condition occurs on a device and the status of the device changes.
You configure the sending of these messages by setting the parameters for the
threshold conditions.
Setting heartbeat polling
To make sure that devices are still “alive” and capable of communicating their status,
the NetCentral manager software periodically broadcasts “ping” type messages which
request a response from the agent. In this way NetCentral Lite is doing a poll to check
the “heartbeat” of the media platform. If NetCentral Lite receives a response, it does
not display any messages or trigger any actions. However, if it does not receive a
response, this indicates a potential problem, so it checks again. If further checks still
do not get a response from the agent software, the media platform is declared dead or
off-line and NetCentral Lite triggers alarm-level actions to notify you of the
condition.
You can configure heartbeat polling by adjusting the following settings:
• Interval between heartbeat checks the period of time that NetCentral Lite waits
between the routine checks for the heartbeat of the media platform.
• Pause before re-checking a faulty device the period of time that NetCentral Lite
waits before it re-checks after the media platform does not respond.
• Re-checks allowed before an alarm is reported the number of times that NetCentral
Lite software re-checks an unresponsive media platform before displaying the
“Dead or off-line” message and triggering alarm-level actions.
When you adjust these settings, you are adjusting the time allowed for a momentary
loss of contact before triggering an alarm. For example, if your network commonly
experiences minor drop-outs that do not necessarily threaten the health of your
devices or systems, you will not want a false alarm every time there is a slight glitch.
In this case you would move the sliders to the right to allow more time for a brief lapse
in contact to be restored, meaning an alarm would go off only when there is no
response from a device for a significant length of time. On the other hand, if your
system is highly critical and you need to know immediately of the slightest indication
of a problem, you would move the sliders to the left to allow less time, meaning that
even a very brief loss of contact would trigger an alarm.
NOTE: These settings could effect the performance of your network. Settings that
cause the polling dialog between the monitoring station and each device to occur
more frequently will increases the amount of network traffic.