Health rules let you specify the parameters that represent what you consider normal or expected operations for your environment. The parameters rely on metric values, for example, the average response time for a business transaction or CPU utilization for a node.

When the performance of an entity affected by the health rule violates the rule's conditions, a health rule violation occurs. The health statuses are represented as critical, warning, normal, and unknown.

When the health status of an entity changes, a health rule violation event occurs. Examples of a health rule violation include:

• Starting
• Ending
• Upgrading from warning to critical or
• Downgrading from critical to warning

The health statuses of entities and health rule violations are surfaced in the controller user interface. A health rule violation event can also be used to trigger a policy, which can initiate automatic actions, such as, sending alerting emails or running remedial scripts.

You create health rules using the health rule wizard, described in Configure Health Rules. The wizard groups commonly-used system entities and related metrics to simplify setting up health rules. You can also use the default health rules as-is, or modify them.