Honestly I never thought I'd say this but I've just inherited a platform and there's too many custom properties! Currently pruning them like Gordon Ramsey prunes a menu on Kitchen Nightmares
Currently I am not actively using SolarWinds at my employer. I had used it for 20 years until here. I am still trying to find a way to justify it.
K.I.S.S.
I'd love to hear your story when your done and have some time. What was not useful / what was, etc. Any you had to migrate?
I will be joining you in that pruning. I just inherited an instance that has way too many custom properties and they duplicated alerts for every department.
Colleague and I are in the same boat, with a platform that was maintained by best efforts. Lots of duplication too, and we're trying to work on how best to streamline. If anyone has any suggestions on how to make the move to new alerting structure less painful, I am all ears and will owe food/drinks if we ever meet.
We use customization in webhelpdesk
I'll certainly be keeping a record of the ones I'm removing, most of the ones seem to be one-offs that were created to make a swql query easier, done by contractors who are just "trying to get the job done"
We use ours to control our alerts. When I inherited the system, things were a bit of a mess. The previous admins tried to use one custom property to control all alerts for every team. Then there were all sorts of random one off alerts for specific systems so they could alert multiple teams. Which lead to the ever popular: This system went down and I didn't receive an alert, how come?I feel like I'm kind of on the heavy side of custom properties that we use for alerts, but it gives the teams the options they need while having standardized alert templates. I'm around 30+ going across the various objects.16 nodes: 8 drop downs for Monitored item (CPU, Packetloss, Node Status, etc...) which sets the action the alert should take (Console, Email, etc..), text field for email address, an ownership drop down for the team, and then some text boxes location information.7 Application: 3 for alert action based on status (Critical/Down, Unknown, Warning), 1 for object type (Component or Application), 1 drop down for timing threshold (how long till it alerts), an email field and an ownership field.4 Volumes: Warning action drop down, critical warning drop down, email and ownership4 datastores: warning action drop down, critical warning drop down, email and ownership
I use custom properties to try to get SolarWinds to be the "single point of truth" within a network.
WOW! Are you jonesing? Do you need help with your justification? I ALWAYS say that the Solarwinds tools are more valuable that a FTE (full time employee) and you don't have to pay for benefits! I have a million justification lines for many of the different tools .., it really is a no-brainer! Good luck @jeremymayfield
I think this is personally the number 1 helpful report for finding out how your custom properties are being used:
(+) Custom Property Impact Assessment - Reports - The Orion Platform - THWACK (solarwinds.com)
I get by with 5-6 CPs in most customer environments. It is possible to go too mad, and make too many, and that can just hinder more than help, as @marlief22 mentioned.
Here are the ones I use.
This....Personally I don't like the approach, but powers on high mandated that they wanted as much "documentation" as possible to be in SolarWinds so we have CPs for all sorts of odds and ends.
I use solawind to customize alert of all server if any downtime occur
\m/
