Specifying recipients of email alerts using custom properties

smargh

I have a custom property on nodes called Alert_Emails_CC. The email action of all my alerts has this as the To: recipient:

OrionAlerts@example.com,${Node.Alert_Emails_CC}

As long as the custom property has an exact syntax, then it works fine. I know from trial & error that the syntax of the custom property values must be exact - email addresses separated by commas, with no spaces anywhere. Adding ${Node.Alert_Emails_CC} to either the CC or BCC headers breaks all alerting completely - it generates errors in the SolarWinds.net event log: WARN Error - ActionEmail.ExecuteAction threw an exception. Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection. Parameter name: index

Using this method, I can have the one email address which receives all alerts (including nodes/interfaces/custom pollers), but for important hosts I can specify additional recipients. This is useful, for example, for our database servers where the DBA needs to be informed that volumes are running out of space.

My query, though, is if this is an "accidental feature" which might be unintentionally broken in future versions, or if maybe it will break the Orion upgrade or database configuration steps.

Alternatively, if Solarwinds wants to develop & perfect this idea then it would be very much appreciated

Thanks.

oiram

This is not documented feature for the recipient field but it does actually work. I have not tested it myself but I have seen installations with single email address in the To: field, I mean single variable only like ${EmailTo} (being custom property on node) where recipient was defined. Although good practice would be to have it configured the way you brought in your post, in case where the property is blank.

Personally I find it quite important to go with such granularity of notification configuration, especially in cases of "bigger environments" where different groups, or even persons are responsible for devices, and there is no point to mess around notifying other people.

I suppose it should be considered as a standard feature in NPM. Even going further it should be applied to every monitored object, no matter what it is - node, interface, volume.