How do you all utilize interface custom properties?

We have never utilized interface custom properties. I was wondering how do you all utilize them? I was thinking of adding the below

interface criticality
interface type
circuit type
connection type
internet carrier

What are some great things you all have done with these properties?

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vinay.by

Hello @SolarWindNoob

1. Firstly, it depends on what you are trying to achieve.

2. Custom properties are great to have but if you have a mid sized or large SolarWinds environment you gotta be careful with how many custom attributes you want to have in your environment and why ? (And you are talking about interfaces here not nodes - so definitely you are ingesting more data)

3. Basically we use this for alerting, reporting, dashboards/view/filters etc or even to have additional information on an object.

4. Designing custom attributes is very important and as well think about how would you populate the value for this is it automated based on some rule or are you adding info manually to them (if its manual - can you maintain them in the long run ?)

5. If its for alerting we can just have one single custom property and use comma separated values which we can play around with.

6. If its for adding additional information on a object which makes sense in your environment then yes like what you have mentioned in your example.

7. Same applies to views or dashboards (we can either play around with a single custom property to control them or we can have multiple).

I mainly use them for alerting and views and I use just a single custom property and I have a comma separated values on that, I play around a lot with 'contains' - if that makes sense. I have a lot of interfaces in my environment which is why its designed so in my case.

Hope this helps, I am sure you will see some great replies from others on this thread.

SolarWindNoob

We have a pretty large environment. We are wanting to be able to create alerts and better reporting on interfaces instead of just nodes. This was very helpful. I appreciate the response!

bobmarley

A couple of things we do is put WAN LINK on them so in the alert we can use logic such as contains WAN LINK = YES in our interface alerts. Another item is we will tag both ends of a circuit to determine is both links is up and the routing neighbors are both up in our alerts. Other than that we don't use the interface ones as much as the Node Custom Properties

jere557

WAN Circuit contact info was also nice if you have multiple ISPs. I had an interface alert set up for any WAN Interface where the email had the ISP, the Support phone number, Circuit ID, and any other info the service rep may need to open a ticket. When I had a circuit down, getting things back online asap was the goal and I don't want to be fumbling through spreadsheets at 3am for a circuit ID if I can just pop that in the alert email.

I always think about the person getting the email at 3am, since i've been him. What does he want so he can get back to bed as soon as possible?

pattpall

We also use a custom property to identify WAN links for reports as well as special alerts. We have a utilization severity an interface down severity custom properties, so we can use global alerts to either send only an email, create a minor alert, major alert, critical alert for different interfaces. This allow us to customize alerts at an interface level. We also have some node level custom properties for alert severities for CPU, Memory, Hardware, Node Down, Reboots, etc. We have NoAlert as an option so we can avoid generating alerts on performance measurements that they don't need to know about. This helps for Lab devices, test devices, etc. We have verification reports that can be run to dump what all the values are for Node Level, Interface Level and Volume level custom properties. We include the NodeID, InterfaceID or VolumeID and I created a PowerShell script that can take a CSV file of that report and update the custom properties for the Nodes, Interfaces and Volumes. If you have thousands of interfaces to update, scripts are great!

bourlis

Hi SolarWindNoob.

We use interface custom properties primarily for alerting. We require the networking team to opt-in for any interface alerting. We also put additional interface custom properties in for 'business hours' versus 'off-hours' alerting.

At one point in time the networking team required an 'ISP carrier name' custom property because our interface naming standards didn't allow that information to be used.

Lastly, I have a free form 'interface comment' custom property that the networking team can use to remark something special for the interface. The networking team used that custom property for alerts and reports.

cscoengineer

Great start. I generally start with isWAN - to let me know this is an edge interface connection.

Then create a page just to monitor the isWAN=true. This incluses text as well as performance analyzer.