Trigger Actions - Send Email Templates

jlukestephens

Greetings all, I've recently created a set of monitors utilizing HTTPS monitor, TCP port monitor, and Windows service monitor components. There are multiple application monitors across multiple servers, and the application monitors are grouped via an 'AppOwner' field which is set to the same value for each.

I created one blanket alert set to trigger on any of these applications having a status other than up, and so far it's working as expected. The issue I'm running into is with getting detail into my alert emails. What is the best way to include thorough detail in my emails? I'm currently including the node affected in the subject, and using the 'Components with problems' variable ${N=SwisEntity;M=ApplicationAlert.ComponentsWithProblemsFormatted}. I'm sure this is not the best solution as I cannot use this variable to include the components affected in the 'Reset' email as the components no longer have problems.

Also, what is the best way to include information regarding a TCP port monitor? As I'm not able to change the name of the component and it's rather vague, is there any variable I can use to include its description in my email? I'm aware that the solution may be to rework my monitoring / create multiple alerts which I'm open to as well.

Thank you for your patience in advance as I am relatively new to this.

mesverrum

Alerting at the app level is less noisy, but the downside is that it also tends to be less detailed.   There just aren't good ootb variables to get specific component level stats if you aren't alerting on the specific components. 

If you changed your alerting strategy to alert at the component level you can pull in a lot more detail,  at risk of having a bit of an alert storm when many components in a single app all go down together. 

An approach I have used also is just to not worry about getting much of the detail into the alert message, train users that they should just follow the link to the Orion console first thing and from there it's easier to just spot whatever you need instead of trying to jam enough detail into the message to avoid having to click the link. 

Another work sound is too use custom sql variables to display exactly what you want,  but given that you say you are new to this I'm not sure you will love diving into the database that way.