Difference between clearing and acknowledging Foglight alarms (4289850)

Difference between clearing and acknowledging Foglight alarms

What is the difference between Clearing and Acknowledging alarms in Foglight?

Foglight provides users with options to both acknowledge and/or clear alarms from the Alarms dashboard.

There are four different options for acknowledging/clearing alarms:

• Acknowledge - if acknowledged, it indicates the alarm has been examined. The user name of the person who acknowledged the alarm appears in the Ack’ed By column for that alarm. If the operator acknowledges an alarm and then it changes its status, this alarm is displayed as unacknowledged to alert the operator to look a little more closely at the problem.
• Acknowledge Until Normal - this acknowledges the current alarm and all consecutive alarms fired by the same rule on the same instance. This option is available to an outstanding (not-yet-cleared) alarm only. For example, assume an alarm goes from Warning to Critical to Warning to Fatal to Critical to Clear. The Foglight operator might recognize the alarm at the warning stage as “a problem related to the batch job”. If so, the operator would want to acknowledge the warning, and all subsequent alarms until normal, so anyone else looking at the alarm console knows he/she has taken a look at the problem.
• Clear - clears the alarm from the list.
• Cancel - returns to the previous view.

I'm getting lots of Credentials alarms notifying WinRM connection issue however the actual agents for which the alarms triggered are collecting data fine. We cleared those alarms since that agents are in fact collecting data fine. But the alarms kept coming back. Next we tried Ack & Clear and after that the alarms have not come back. What is the difference? "Clear" - "I've corrected this problems and old alarms should be removed. If it happens again I want a new alarm" "Ack and Clear" - "I know about this problem but have not fixed it yet. Do not generate new alarms about this until the problem has both been corrected and reappears"