Explanation of terms

Terms used in Argus are loosely based on the ITIL standard for IT service management.

acknowledgement

an acknowledgement of an incident by a user, which hides the incident from the other open incidents.

end_time

the time the incident was resolved or closed.

  • If the value is an instance of datetime the incident is stateful, and was resolved or closed at the given time. If the end time is in the future, the incident is considered still open.

  • If null the incident is stateless (i.e. it cannot be closed).

  • If "infinity" the incident is stateful, but has not yet been resolved or closed - for example, if it is still open.

event

something that happened related to an incident.

expiration

When, if ever, an acknowledgement ceases to be in effect.

  • If expiration is an instance of datetime (for example 2011-11-11T11:11:11+02:00), the incident will be shown again after the expiration time.

  • If expiration is SQL null, represented in code as Python None, the acknowledgement will never expire.

  • An incident is considered “acked” (acknowledged) if it has one or more acknowledgements that have not expired.

filter

Filters are used to:

  • Limit which incidents are returned via the API.

  • Check whether notifications should be sent when a new incident is registered or when an existing incident is changed via an event.

Filter.filter

A single filter is stored in the Filter model’s filter-attribute, as JSON.

FilterBlobSerializer

What filters look like and what they do is customizable. This serializer validates and represents the structure of a filter stored in Filter.filter.

incident

an unplanned interruption in the source system

primary key

Abbreviated as pk or <int:pk>.

Argus uses “primary keys” to uniquely identify users, phone numbers, incidents, incident source systems, notification profiles, timeslots and similar. A primary key is a non-negative integer number. It is unique by the context it refers to (for example, phone numbers’ pks are unique for each user).

source

the source system that the incident originated in.

start_time

the time the incident was created.

stateful incident

A stateful incident can be open (still open to change) or closed (probably won’t change). A stateful incident has both a start_time and an end_time and the time in between is a duration.

stateless incident

A stateless incident can neither be open nor closed, nor can it have a duration. It is a moment in time, well suited for heart-beats and one-off messages. A stateless incident uses the start_time-field to store when it happened.

tag

a key-value pair in the form of key=value.

  • The key can consist of lowercase letters, numbers and underscores.

  • The value can consist of any length of any characters.

tristate

A value that can be one of True, False, or None. Used in filters. A stateful incident can be open or closed, but an incident filter can look for incidents that are either open, closed or ignore the distinction.