Under Group Alerts, there is no node variable that I can used to help me. Is there any way I can email the node details which went down when the alert is triggered?
Hey there, just want to know that I'm understanding your question correctly. Are you wanting to receive an email that contains node information for devices that go down?
Screenshots would really help on what you would like to see
I run into this kind of question a lot, there are no built in variables or relationships going from a group alert to the objects inside the groups. You are approaching it from the top down and the UI doesn't really facilitate that, you would have to approach it from the bottom up.
For the point of view of Solarwinds a group is a pile of nodes/interfaces/compionents/whatever. The group alerts are focused on the group itself, if you want to alert on things happening to the objects in the group then you would need to build, for example, a node down alert. If you want to build a node alert that is tied to group membership then you are out of luck unless you write it using custom swql/sql, because the GUI doesn't draw those connections. The way the Solarwinds devs seem to want it to work is that you focus on custom properties for your organizing needs. You can build alerts that key into them and you can build groups that key into them.
A typical example I see at a lot of clients would be to have a group called "Active Directory" that they built by manually going out and selecting each AD server one by one. Then they decide they want to build an alert that says take some special action if a node that is a member of "Active Directory" goes down. Can't do that. What you end up doing is to go to custom properties and make one that you can use to indicate if the node should be int he "Active Directory" group, I usually call this one Applications and I go to the custom property editor and mark Active Directory in that custom property for all the servers I need (for some reason the custom property editor seems to be the only place in the GUI that you CAN filter nodes by group membership). Then we go back to the "Active Directory" group, remove all the manual entries and set up a dynamic rule that says any node where Applications contains Active Directory goes in this group. Now I have my group, I go to the alert builder and create an alert that filters to nodes where the Applications custom property contains Active Directory. Take whatever special actions I wanted.
I almost never build email alerts on the group object itself except in a few edge cases like when the group is an HA pair or something like that.
