Couldn't see a request for this yet....Having custom properties for groups would be great.
Can you tell us a little more about what you would do if you had these? For example: reporting, specific views, alerting, etc?
The most important for us right now would be contact information. We use groups to determine the health of multi-tiered applications so support can be any number of teams. If a part of the application breaks in one of the groups, we don't have any way to supply the correct contact info for the alert. As there is no guarantee that a group will contain a node, we cannot rely on a custom property from the nodes table to get that contact info in there. Another idea that jumps out is custom property for SLA level. We have custom properties for nodes that indicate what SLA that node must meet. Alerts are created to take different actions depending on the different SLA of the node, the same logic would be great for groups.
I'm sure there are a number of other use cases but the 2 above stand out for us.
It would be great to use the Group custom properties for filtering Group List. Example only show me groups that have custom property value of XX in the group list.
Currently I have situation where I have limitations by user and when a user views the home screen which has the "All Groups" list all groups are listed even though they do not apply to that user since there are no member devices listed either. The other way to fix this specific issue would be to have an "Auto Hide" if empty option on the "All Groups" list so that if all members of a group were filtered through a limitation the empty group would not be shown.
This is essential.
Custom property field(s) or defined field(s) to filter group lists presented to different audiences would be nice. Where over time you could create a large number of location based groups to leverage dependencies on associated location router groups, the list can get quite long.
Nesting groups is possible, however dynamic query isn't available to maintain the nest over time. The combination of custom property with dynamic query to nest groups would be great.
I agree all of them. Nice comment.
I too think this as a very important feature and would like to see it on your feature list with a very high priority for the next release!
I group all equipment I have by physical location. I would ideally utilize this to maintain geocoded information in custom properties of the group, as well as priority and type of location (i.e. hospital, clinic, etc.). Having priority and location type within the group would allow for me to build alerting logic to notify certain support teams based of the status of the group. I currently maintain a separate DB with a table that has all this information, and I have to call an external program that I wrote in perl to do joins between the tables in the NPM DB and my custom DB to marry the information so that I can notify via email to specific groups. Having custom properties on groups in NPM natively would allow me to do all the logic there rather than having to pass it to an external program.
This would be very helpful for alerting!
We really really need this. Any update?
Any update on this ?
this would be great, especially if you could then alert on the status of the group to an email address. would be nice to be able to group all of one customers nodes to a group and have an alert email sent to the customer based on the group status
Hi guys - any news? We urgently need this in order to work around issues with alerting for WPM. This seems like the path of least resistance.
Another vote. This is what is preventing our support team from working solely out of Orion.
Hello. Anyone?
Update
We are evaluating this feature.
Summarizing the use-case for this feature
Questions
Stefan,
Could you elaborate on how would you use this feature (alerting for WPM) ?
Thanks
Peter Krutý
We have 400+ remote sites. Each remote site has 5+ network devices and already monitoring with NPM.
A remote site has also a contact name, IATA code, telephone number and most importantly a network map. We need to draw a network map for each remote site (group) and show it on the group page for each of them. We can't do it because of the limitation. Is it definitive enough for you?
Your list hits most of the high points for me.
Maintaining group membership based upon node attributes would be my number one. You touched on World Wide Map, if geocode attribute data became available for groups then I'd start using that feature. Otherwise implying this data across a thousands of nodes, across hundreds of global locations with locations and devices changing frequently can be cumbersome.
Considering groups and world wide map, I'll drop mention of this enhancement idea dropped by rgward: http://thwack.solarwinds.com/ideas/3126
My particular interest pulls in some functionality of the old Network Atlas
Any update on this? We have been waiting so long for this.
Have we seen the v12 beta? NPM 12.0 BETA4 + QOE NOW AVAILABLE
An essential feature when implementing groups to cut down on alerts in a more complex environment
