A filter specifies one or more events that you want your event automation plan to process. The event automation plan ignores any event instances that do not meet the specifications of the filter. Typically, you will use the common event filters that are provided in the Event Automation Plan wizard. Occasionally there are situations where you will want to create a sophisticated event filter. The event filters described in this section are available for such implementations. Using these filters, you can specify details for an event such that it covers very specific problems and occurrences. To create filters quickly, default values are provided; however, you can customize the settings.
If a system cannot generate the event that you want to filter, the filter will not be effective on that system. In such instances, you can apply the event automation plan to those systems, but it will have no effect. For example, if an event filter is based on an event for BladeCenter® products and that event automation plan is applied to systems that do not include BladeCenter products, the event filter has no events to filter, and therefore, no actions are performed. If you understand this concept, you can create more complex event automation plans, and you can reduce the number of event automation plans you must build and maintain.
In addition to selecting the event types to filter, you also can select from four types of event filters: Simple, Duplication, Exclusion, and Threshold. Each filter offers different options for processing the selected event types.