Am I using "node" custom properties correctly?

cmarti

Hello,

Thanks in advance.  We're a new shop to Solarwinds SAM, just converted from another vendor's monitoring product.  From what we've seen on the alerts that we've setup, custom properties are the way to go with specifying "who" should receive an alert email. 

For example

============

If we have the following servers:

- ServerA

- ServerB

- ServerC

- ServerD

- ServerE

So we would setup a custom property called PingFailedEMail and populate it, via an alert that sets the custom property, with the following email addresses (if the custom property is empty):
- HelpDeskA@mycompany.com- ServerTeamA@mycompany.com

In our alert, the email recipient would be the custom property "PingFailedEmail".

On ServerB, AppTeamA@mycompany.com needs to receive an email on it also.  So I would append AppTeamA@mycompany.com to the PingFailedEmail custom property, so here is how the emails look on a ping alert:

- ServerA - email goes to: (HelpDeskA@mycompany.com ServerTeamA@mycompany.com)

- ServerB - email goes to: (HelpDeskA@mycompany.com ServerTeamA@mycompany.com, AppTeamA@mycompany.com)

- ServerC - email goes to: (HelpDeskA@mycompany.com ServerTeamA@mycompany.com)

- ServerD - email goes to: (HelpDeskA@mycompany.com ServerTeamA@mycompany.com)

- ServerE - email goes to: (HelpDeskA@mycompany.com ServerTeamA@mycompany.com)

Here's where it gets a little swirly.......

We have a lot of one offs like ServerB for not only ping alerts, we have it for service down failures, process down failures, file age alerts.  My end goal is to have one alert (or the least number possible) for ping, service being down, process being down, and file not updated.  I would like to populate the alert with the custom properties.  Currently I have 123 custom properties and that number will increase.

I have three questions from all of this:

1) Am I using custom properties wrong?

2) Am I heading towards some type of impending Solarwinds doom by having a lot of custom properties?

3) Is there a better way to do what I'm trying to accomplish?

rflanagan32871

One of the ways you can do that for each application monitor is have a custom property set to each application such as 'Application Owner'. then when one of the components alerts you can have you alert use that application owner to direct it for each app template deployed to each server.

You will need to make sure you have this set for all applications and then reference both in the trigger action so the email would go:

- ServerB - email goes to: (HelpDeskA@mycompany.com;​ *ApplicationOwner*)

This allows you to be more granular based off of the applications on each server instead of having everything go to the node property.