Testing situations using CT_Alert SOAP call

This article further expands the usage of Justin Eagleson's Postemsg for ITM 6.

Sometimes you might want to test if your situations are handled correctly but there is no way you can set the situation to evaluate to true value. For example, for most of the disk, memory or CPU situations, it is very difficult to make the situation to evaluate to true value. Ofcourse, you can change the thresholds but this might lead to errors/inconsistencies if one forgets to changes these thresholds back. One other difficulty is that testing situations would invariably cause outages, which are frowned upon in a production environment. This is where CT_Alert SOAP call comes into picture.

The CT_Alert SOAP call sets a situation to true value even if the underlying threshold is not met on the given managed system. Please note that CT_Alert causes the situation to appear in "Open" status in Siutation Event Console even if the situation has been previously acknowledged or restarted.

Invoking CT_Alert SOAP call

The latest gbscmd has the ability to invoke CT_Alert SOAP call from the command line.
perl gbscmd alertSit --server itm61 --situation --source [--data "Alert text"]

Please note that this code update has not been released to our subscribers yet as we will release it after adding few more features. Have you not subscribed to gbscmd yet? Please see this article for further details about how to subscribe to gbscmd and how to do some cool things using gbscmd.