Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Alarms and Notifications for Resource Monitoring

Automate the monitoring of resource usage for Compute, Storage, and Oracle Exadata by setting threshold-based alarms. When usage exceeds defined threshold, Control Center sends weekly email notifications that summarize usage trends and alarm breaches. This feature helps with capacity planning and reduces manual monitoring.

Supported Resources

The alarms and notifications feature supports the following resources:
  • Compute: Configure alarms for specific shapes (such as AMD Standard and Intel Standard X7) and hardware generations (such as E5 and E4).
  • Storage: Set alarms for Block Storage, Object Storage, and File Storage. Alarms can be based on storage type.
  • Oracle Exadata: Set alarms for Exadata nodes, including node types (such as DB and HC) and shapes (such as X9M and X11M).
Note

Alarms do not support Networking resources.

Key Functionalities

  • Alarm configuration:
    • Create alarms by defining usage thresholds (such as 65% or 85% of total capacity) for specific resources in the OCC Console.
    • You can include up to three email addresses (subscribers) for each alarm configuration.
    • Enable or disable alarms and update thresholds as needed.
    • To change alarm parameters such as subscribers, resource configurations, or resource type, delete the alarm and create a new one.
    • Delete or disable alarms when you no longer need them.
  • Notifications:
    • Control Center sends notifications by email using OCI Email Delivery.
    • The email includes the alarm description and a weekly summary of the current usage percentage for the configured resource. The alarm configuration and current usage percentage appear in bold when the usage exceeds the threshold.
    • By default, weekly emails are sent every Monday at around 19:30 UTC. Each email summarizes threshold breaches and usage trends from the previous week.
    • Each email displays the alarm name, resource type, region, threshold, current usage.
  • Alarm granularity:
    • Compute: Set alarms by hardware generation (such as Intel Standard X7, AMD Dense E5).
    • Storage: Set alarms by storage type (Block, Object, File Storage).
    • Oracle Exadata: Set alarms by node type (Compute or Storage) and shape (such as X9M).
  • Subscription management:
    • Manage email subscriptions through Notifications topics, allowing operators to add, update, or delete recipients.
    • Link subscriptions to new or existing topics when creating alarms.
    • Tenancy administrators can add external recipients (such as contractors or distribution lists) to simplify subscription management.

Prerequisites: Required IAM Policies

Before creating or managing alarms and notifications, add the required IAM policies based on your access pattern.

Console Access for Alarm Resources

To access and manage alarm resources in the OCI Console, add the following policies in the customer tenancy.

Note

  • The following example uses the group control-center-alarm-users. Include in this group users who need access to the Alarms and Notifications page in Control Center, including the ability to create alarm configurations and add Notifications topics to alarm configurations. For more information on creating groups, see Creating a Group.
  • If you can already access the Alarms page in Control Center and create alarm configurations, you can skip these policies. This access means you already have broader IAM permissions that cover alarm resource creation and management.

Create the following policy in your tenancy to allow a user to manage alarms and subscriptions in OCC:

Allow group control-center-alarm-users to manage control-center-metric-alarms in tenancy

Create the following policy in your tenancy to allow a user to manage subscriptions in the Notifications service:

Allow group control-center-alarm-users to manage ons-family in tenancy

Email Notifications Through OCI Notifications

To allow the Control Center service tenancy to read Notifications resources for email notifications, add the following cross-tenancy policy in the customer tenancy. This access is required to read the topics in the customer tenancy so that email notifications are sent to the subscribers.

Define tenancy OCIControlCenter as <oci_control_center_tenancy_ocid>
Admit any-user of tenancy OCIControlCenter to read ons-family in tenancy
    where request.principal.type = 'instance'

<oci_control_center_tenancy_ocid> is the OCID of the OCI Control Center service tenancy. To get this value, create a support request, requesting the OCID of the OCI Control Center service tenancy. Mentioning "OCI Control Center" helps to route the ticket appropriately.