How to correctly set up a text alert in Solarwinds?

Hi, for a while now I've been trying to figure out how to correctly configure an alert in Solarwinds so it texts database team when our primary SQL node fails over to our secondary node.

In the trigger actions for this alert I am using 'Configure Action: Execute an External Program' which runs a batch file located on our polling server which should send a text to their personal phone numbers from a system called GovNotify. We use this system for other text alerts from other software we use.

I'm just hoping anyone who sees this has any ideas for me to try or knows where I'm going wrong? I've been trying to sort this for 7-8 months now and gotten as close as the alert working but it sent the text 7 hours after the nodes failed over. I've tried to contact Solarwinds and Prosperon about this but never managed to find a functional fix unfortunately but they were really helpful.

Any help would be super appreciated!

Thanks, Niall

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Lofstrand

Hi, I have no idea on how GovNotify works but I would start to look in the alert logs.

If the alert triggers when the failover occurs, then the actions should trigger at the same time. See these logs for issues
C:\ProgramData\SolarWinds\Logs\Orion\ActionsExecutionAlert.log
C:\ProgramData\SolarWinds\Logs\Orion\ActionsExecution.log

Also, when you click on the alert in the alert list you come to the page "Active Alert details". There you have the widget "History of this alert on this object". There you should see when the action was executed.

If the action is executed at the right time but the text message takes several hours, I doubt it's SolarWinds fault.

Naboose19

Hi, thanks for getting back to me - I've just had a look in solarwinds and the alert was never triggered and I can't find any logs from today yesterday either when our SQL servers were patched, that should have triggered the alert since they're staggered patching. From all my support sessions too we've never been able to see any alerts being triggered in Solarwinds.

When the alert worked but took several hours that was just a one off, since we tried and tested other fixes it has never done that again.

Lofstrand

Ok, the next step is to see if the monitoring of the SQL failover is working. How are you monitoring that SQL has done a failover? Did monitoring see the failover?

What kind of SQL HA is this? WFC or AG?

When we know that we can continue troubleshooting.

Naboose19

I'm just monitoring the SQL nodes via WMI polling for solarwinds, same with the Failover Clustering service on the server itself. I don't think the monitoring picked the failover up on solarwinds too

It's a AG SQL