How to tune host comparisons

AvailabilityGuard can report on differences between a group of hosts through the Comparison tab, Tickets and the Host Configuration Differences reports. 

AvailabilityGuard provides the following tuning options for comparisons:

• Default ignore list
• Tuning options in the Comparison tab
• Comparison ticket tuning

Default ignore list

Several System properties are available to define and control which items should be ignored during the comparison. For example, you can guide AvailabilityGuard to ignore specific kernel parameters of ESXi host options.

List of Comparison Tuning System Properties

Tuning options in the Comparison tab

Working with worksheets enables more specific tuning. When selecting a specific detected difference, the comparison tab offers the following tuning options:

• Fine Tune menu item --> Ignore selected components. This option will suppress the difference in focus.
• Fine Tune menu item --> Ignore selected components in the entire worksheet. This option will suppress the selected item for all the comparison groups in the worksheet. This option can be useful to eliminate repetitive differences that are by design or not harmful.
• Ignore All. At the lower buttons bar, the Ignore All () button enables users to ignore in one-click ALL the differences in open comparison group tabs. This is particularly useful when the intend of the user is to acknowledge all existing differences as acceptable but continue to monitor and detect newly created differences.

NOTE: Take particular care click Save Worksheet () to apply changes made to worksheets. 

Comparison ticket tuning

The majority of Comparison tickets are generated based on Comparison worksheets in the Comparison tab. You can identify those tickets based on the mentioning of the worksheet in the ticket summary.

By Default, AvailabilityGuard will only open tickets for kernel parameter differences detected in the Default group. The Default group is a built-in group that automatically generates and manages its comparison groups based on discovered clusters (local and get), standby configurations and more. Users can control whether tickets should be generated based on differences of a worksheet and for which category by opening the worksheet and editing the Monitoring settings in the Overview tab.

Monitoring settings of a Comparison Worksheet

To tune an already open comparison ticket, simply ignore the difference on which it is based in the reported worksheet as described here. The ticket will be updated or closed (if no other differences remain) in the next risk analysis cycle. You can also click on the Detect Host Configuration Tickets () button to update the tickets now - take particular care to click Save Worksheet before running the comparison tickets update process.