Monitoring Database and Hard Disk Drive Space

Notification monitors the system on which it is installed for low database and hard disk drive space.

Monitoring Database Size

Notification periodically monitors the size of the data in the data file of the underlying SQL Server database. When the system encounters a situation with either critically low database or hard disk space it will automatically perform an emergency purge operation of closed incidents in order to free up database or hard disk space.

The following alarms are triggered if the database size reaches the preconfigured levels:

  • Warn: The preconfigured percentage value for the warn level is 50% of the total allocated Database space.
    • When the database size reaches this level, a NoAckNoReset event is raised in the Status alarm class.
    • An archive or purge operation must be performed manually to free up space. The event remains in Active state until the database level has reached a level below the warn level. (see Purging Data in Installation and Project Setup procedures).
      Please note that databases that are configured with unrestricted growth will trigger neither any Warn or Critical events, nor an emergency purge operation.
  • Critical: The preconfigured percentage value for the critical level is 70% of the total allocated database space.
    • When the database size reaches this level, a NoAckNoReset event is raised in the Fault alarm class.
    • Notification starts an automatic emergency purge operation. The event remains in Active state until the database level has reached a level below the critical level. (see Purging Data in Installation and Project Setup procedures).
    • During emergency force purge operation, the incident status (Completed, Cancelled, Cancelling, AllClear, Suspended, Suspending, Active) is sequentially removed to bring the database below critical level.
      NOTE: The incident status can be configured in the Mns_ProjectSpecific.config file located under <InstallationDrive>:\GMSProjects\<ProjectName>\mns.
  • Database Full: The preconfigured percentage value for the database full level is 80% of the total allocated database space.
    • When the database size reaches this level, a NoAckNoReset event is raised in the Fault alarm class.
    • Notification starts an automatic emergency purge operation. The event remains in Active state until the database level has reached a level below the database full level. (see Purging Data in Installation and Project Setup procedures).
    • All user interface operations, incident triggering are blocked when database is full.
      NOTE: When database is full some operations namely, archive, purge, cancel incidents, and close incidents are allowed.

NOTE:
Unlike a manual or scheduled Archive and Purge cycle, the emergency purge operation is executed without a preceding Archive operation and may therefore lead to data loss of old incident data. It is therefore important to regularly create project backups as well as archive and purge Notification to maintain system health. (See Manually Archiving the Notification Data or Scheduling the Automatic Archiving of Notification Data using reactions in Installation and Project Setup procedures).
The emergency purge operation is a measure of last resort to maintain system functionality for eventual emergency situations and should not be relied upon for normal system operations.
As the emergency purge operation only purges closed incidents, it is the responsibility of the operator to periodically close completed incidents during normal system operation for this feature to have the desired impact.
Database Warn, Critical and Full level is configured in ascending order.

Monitoring Hard Disk Drive Space

Notification uses Desigo CC alarms from Hard Disk Drive nodes as triggers for low disk space. An alarm must be configured for the hard disk drive that contains the current project folder specifying the disk space levels to be monitored. When an alarm is raised for low disk space, since these alarms do not support alerting at different fill levels and as such there is only a critical fill level for hard disk space. Notification alerts the operator with a Fault event and starts the emergency purge operation. The event remains in Alarm state until the monitored hard disk drive has reached Normal level. (see Monitoring the Hard Drive of a Station)

Encryption of Notification Database

Encryption of Notification Database can be done by following the similar steps mentioned in Additional HDB Toolbar Control Procedures> Encrypt the History Database section in History Infrastructure Procedures.