Cisco Active Network Abstraction Administrator’s Guide, 3.5
Page 162 Cisco Systems, Inc.
• A rule can perform many types of actions, such as:
• Add or remove an object from the working memory
• Modify an object
• Execute a method on one of the objects
• The Agenda is where Drools stores the list of rules to be fired.
D.2 Drools and ANA Integration
The Drools rule engine enables the user to extend the ANA alarm correlation
mechanism with user-defined rules and business logic.
The Drools rule engine is fully integrated within the Cisco ANA Gateway
and does not require any synchronization or maintenance. It can access all
ANA information and functions:
• Use up-to-date network information (topology, hierarchy, inventory) as
part of its rule processing
• Create and manipulate alarms, and send commands to NEs
• Define operator-logic rules, such as:
• If the alarm was not attended to within 2 hours then…
• If there are more than 5 open alarms on this device then…
• If today is Tuesday then…
The rules are written for Drools in xml format files, and can be modified and
reloaded in runtime. There is neither a need to compile the rules, nor to
restart any ANA component.
ANA maintains two Drools processing instances (Contexts), with two
respective rule files:
• Pre-correlation processing context
• Post-correlation processing context
The Rule files are located under ~sheer/Main/data in the ANA
Gateway server.
D.3 Drools Definitions in ANA
The Drools mechanism runs in two processing contexts:
• Pre-correlation context – defined in the pre.drl rule file
• Post-correlation context – defined in the post.drl rule file.
