Custom properties for application monitors kind of suck. OK, it's not that the properties themselves actually suck it is that they aren't leveraged by a lot of people. Why? Because there isn't a really good way to manage custom properties via the template. In fact, application templates do NOT have custom properties. If you want to define custom properties, you need to do so at the application monitor level.
All of this is important to understand because it takes *work* to do things like auto-populate custom properties from an external source (like a CMDB) on an application monitor. We've done it and we thought we had hit the jackpot. Application monitors are linked to their template via the ApplicationID defined in the CMDB. This AppID also allows us to link in data from the CMDB to populate those custom properties.
Then I read the following KB article:
SWQL filter syntax examples
And found much sadness in this section:
Filtering by custom properties is NOT available for applications. All of our hard work to pull together custom properties tied to an external data source and I can't even use them to filter widget scope?!? Where's my cursing Q-Bert when I need him??
Our workaround is going to be to create groups based on the values we would want to see in each filtered widget and then create new views that are filtered by group. It is a terrible solution because of the technical debt we will incur in keeping the views managed (even with dynamic queries for groups!) and up to date.
Please add application custom properties to the SWQL filter list!
