Orion NPM sends out a slew of emails when I take it down for upgrades or maint. I'd like to temporarily stop the emails during this time. Is there a way to do this?
I'm not sure of an official way, but you could go into your Alerts Manager on Orion and check all of the boxes and disable all alerts. Then, when you are finished, head back into the Alerts Manager and turn them all back on. It doesn't seem terribly efficient, but it would turn off all emails during a maintenance window.
Thank you. I thought of that, but then I'd need to remember exactly which alerts were on and which were off in the first place. I also thought of removing the SMTP server; but I didn't know if Orion would just stage the emails for later sending once I re-entered the SMTP info.
There's a more "offical" way. You can go to start>all programs>Solarwinds Orion>Advanced Features>Unmanage Scheduling Utility. From there you can schedule a time for any/all nodes to be unmanaged. It's still a tad cludgy; ideally I would like to see a "Maintenance Mode" feature. I don't think there is one that I am aware of.
If I may add a related question to this discussion please.
What have you seen in situations where the SolarWinds server itself has been rebooted for whatever reason? Do you find your self receiving a flood of alerts on monitored elements?
It really comes down to how you have everything configured. In my experiences, if nothing is monitoring the Solarwinds server itself then you will not receive a flood of alerts on monitored elements upon it rebooting. What I would theoretically want to get in that situation is an email notification from LEM informing me that a shutdown process has begun on the Windows box hosting all of my Solarwinds elements. It's possible the Orion box would inform me itself that it is shutting down, however I cannot recall if I've seen email notifications on that before. Regardless, it should not flood you on monitored elements unless they are all undergoing a reboot process as well.
assuming you are generating the emails via alerts, you could just disable alerts on that specific alert on the manage alerts or that specific trigger action
Or if you are aiming at specific nodes you could unmanage those specific nodes to suppress the alerts
*Edit - After reading an earlier post, just check under action manager then find the ones that send emails
You can use the "Valid time of the Day" from the alert you created or simply disable the alert.
This is easily done from Orion Platform 2015.x. Prior to your maintenance beginning, open the Orion Platform Web Console. Next Go to Settings > Manage Alerts > Click on "Active Alerts" in top right Corner. On the Active Alerts page, click the "More" drop down in Top Right Corner > Check "Pause actions of all alerts". follow the same procedure and Uncheck the "Pause actions" behavior setting.
You can get to this area directly by browsing to http://[orion url]/Orion/NetPerfMon/Alerts.aspx
To revert, follow the same procedure and Uncheck the "Pause actions" behavior setting.
It should be noted that this method will pause all actions in all alerts globally, this includes Email actions, Script Actions, etc. Thus no processes will be ran. To ensure you do not have false alarms, I generally enable this option about 5 to 10 minutes before the first step that will cause alerts and wait about 5 to 10 minutes after your maintenance is concluded to re-enable. This was crucial in our environment as a large portion of our alerts have Actions that interact with our ticketing system to auto-create tickets for Customer device or network outages. Actions Paused.... no actions... no extra work. Actions not Paused... between 500 to 1000+ false alarms and potentially several hundred tickets to go in and close. It was a no brainer for us. There is also a way to do this on older platforms (2014.x and older) If you need a walkthrough for those (it is not quite as easy as you have to disable both Basic and Advanced Alerts) just let me know and I can write it.
That is good to know, I have maintenance tonight. Why these options are not under "Manage Alerts" is a little odd to me. But at least the option is there.
Does this means it will auto paused all triggered actions that we created? I mean let that the alert was integrated to the ticketing tool.
are the event-collector's stop blind as well? sometimes if we do maintanance in the center of the network we loos 95% of the connections (NMS) and this will make statistics bad.... I stop usualy the collector porcess on the server... this helps as well, if I am finished I start it again.....
What we see here after a restart of the services of solarwinds we get bombarded with alert emails. This is always a scare at the office.
It doesn't "Auto pause" anything, when you click that checkmark it will pause all actions for all alerts that exist in the system. This means any trigger with any condition and any following action. None of them will run. This is the best way to silence the entire platform.
No, event collectors do not stop unless you manually stop the services as you indicated that you do.
The above mentioned checkmark changes an entry in the Orion database that pauses all alert actions by all pollers, so doing this would prevent that.
In Windows Services manually Stop these services and set them to Startup Type 'Manual' until you are done with your maintenance then change them back to automatic and restart them.
