Group Monitoring vs Application Monitoring on Nodes ?

namreg

Hello,

I have created applications to monitor services in certain nodes through SAM and respective alerts.

The nodes mentioned above are part of groups.

Now, I am wondering what is the benefit of adding the applications and alerts into Groups ?

Thanks for your help

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cahunt

The groups are simply container that you can add Any entity Type to. So you could put your Apps, Servers and Switches associated with the app in the same group.

This would show you a status of all entities. Groups are useful on the World Map. Custom Properties are better used for the Idea of grouping, Sorting, Filtering - to impliment in alerts and views.

Regarding Alerting on your apps, the best way to do this is to Alert on the Component Status. You can pull in all associated details for the App, Server, etc to include in the alert email. If you alert on the app, you have an option for error message, but miss some of the details for components.

Altering is best usually when alerting on the most granular object in your setup. For apps, that would be the components. This way you can pull in the component name, status and other details along with the App and Node Details.

Hope this helps.

-CharlesH

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namreg

Yes, I understand what you said. But, i am trying to understand the benefit of adding an application monitor into a group. Let's say "Test_Service" application which monitors the "Print Spooler" service on a node. I have an alert that tells me if the service is down, sends me an email and restart the service and notifies me when the service has been restarted.

So, if I add the "Test_Service" application into a group ? What do I gain ? What can I do with it in regards of alerting if the service is down. ?

Thanks for your help....

cahunt

You gain the ability to put that group on the World Map or any Map. Plus the option to show your grouped items visually.

Not much....there are some FR's out there to expand the correlation of the groups to more DB tables. (And I am sure I might even be missing a major point with the groups as well - I'll let it marinade over the weekend and see if anything else comes to mind.)

And if you build out a lot of groupings and nested groups it has the potential to put a load on your system. If you decide to use the groups watch your system performance at 100-200 + groups. If your hardware if beefy you might not even see an issue.

would setup groups to correlate items/app associated items, or locations. If you have a NOC view/display this is where you can setup a dashboard and use those groups to show an overall status. Or even a Managers page where you have the overall status of the deliverable services/apps/etc.

So if you Group the app & server, key network nodes, and other devices that if down would affect the print service/ability to print you can get a visual

If you have different locations, or separate servers for different departments, or however that breaks down, create individual groups for those and nest them inside a larger print service group. The overall group can go warning - and a mouse over or click would give you the specific group that is having an issue.

If you wanted a simpler alert (and your naming convention or some other details make for an easy read out) you could use the group or group member alert to send an email to the service/help desk to inform them of the issue possibly giving a general location/department affected so they do not hammer your ops team with tickets. Then when the issue is re-mediated they get that email and can contact the users to find any one off's that are still an issue and might need more attention.

It really depends on how you want to build it out, and there are several options to get it done and make the app work and perform exactly as you desire.