Flapping

Flapping occurs when a monitored entity, such as a service or host, changes state too frequently, making the cause and severity of the incident unclear. For example, flapping can be indicative of configuration issues (such as thresholds set too low), troublesome services, or real network problems.

In BigPanda, an incident enters the flapping state when one or more of the associated alerts are flapping. By default, an alert is considered to be flapping when it has changed states more than 4 times in a one-hour time window. If you need to configure custom logic (updates to the number of state changes within a period of time or the time window) for your organization, contact BigPanda Support and request a product change.

BigPanda checks the flapping criteria every 15 minutes. When an incident enters the flapping state, a notification will be sent that an incident has started flapping, and another notification when the incident is no longer flapping. An incident exits the flapping state when all related alerts stop flapping (no longer meet the criteria for number of state changes in a period of time). Any activity between these two notifications will be filtered.