Advanced Alert only returns an "Unknown" status for a UnDP

ouberlord

Hello,

I've been struggling all afternoon with what I thought would have been an easy alert to set up.  I have a UnDP named "Status" that queries a Sharp printer to return its current status.  This functions, as on the node's page it almost invariably shows a status of "Ready" and occasionally one of "Printing".  I would like to set up an alert that triggers should this status be anything but those two responses.

I set up a trigger condition to fire off when all of the following apply:

Poller Name is equal to Status (keep in mind, that's the UnDP's name)

Status is not equal to Ready

Status is not equal to Printing

However, I quickly found that this alert *always* triggers.  I made a trigger action contain the following in the body:

Status is ${Status}

Assignment Name is ${AssignmentName}

Custom OID is ${CustomPollers.OID}

Custom Unique Name is ${CustomPollers.UniqueName}

Custom Rate is ${CustomPollerStatus.Rate}

Custom Raw Status is ${CustomPollerStatus.RawStatus}

Custom Status is ${CustomPollerStatus.Status}

Custom Total is ${CustomPollerStatus.Total}

As such, I get the following in an email:

Status is Unknown

Assignment Name is Status on AR-M350 - 6th Floor HR

Custom OID is 1.3.6.1.4.1.1536.1.3.2.1.11.1

Custom Unique Name is Status

Custom Rate is

Custom Raw Status is

Custom Status is Ready

Custom Total is

Thus, it seems like "Custom Status" is what I want, not "Status".  How do I make this work?

ouberlord

Hello Andy,

Thanks for the reply.  I ended up finding the solution a week or two ago, and had neglected to properly update and close this thread.

The issue revolved around the configuration of the trigger conditions.  In the initial configuration the trigger conditions were the following:

Trigger Alert when all of the following apply

     Poller Name is equal to Status (The UnDP's name)

     Status is not equal to Ready

     Status is not equal to Printing

For clarification's sake I renamed the UnDP to "PrinterStatus", hoping to stave off further confusion when reading the trigger rules and potentially some sort of conflict.  However, this itself had no impact on the problem.  I then put more thought into the logic itself, and found that the following *does* work:

Trigger Alert when all of the following apply

     Poller Name is equal to PrinterStatus

     Trigger alert when none of the following apply

          Status contains Ready

          Status contains Printing

It is my assumption that when performing logic checks on text strings the "is equal to" and "is not equal to" checks do not function properly, and always return a false/true result respectively.  I found that using "contains" and nesting them within a "Trigger when None" group works as intended, and also better covers other devices (as one other model reports its status as "Ready..." instead of "Ready").