Organizing Alerts

Question

How do you have your alerts organized?

By device groups? By groups of individuals? By each individual devicer?

Currently I have my alerts by device groups. And while this makes it nice to manage and add people to get all of the alerts by a certain group, there are instances when one person ones to be alerted on one device. Or sometimes servers can be in multiple groups. For instance a server might be an App or a DB but is also part of the Data Center group.

Sometimes I need to stop alerting on a particular device and then need to remember all the possible groups it's in. Or I have to add a new device and figure out what alerts it needs to go in.

An individual alert for each device solves that problem but that also becomes harder to maintain should I need to add someone to several devices at once.

So what do you do? I'm looking for new ideas and suggestions.

jluke · Answer

any info on the best way to organize alerts?

I would like to supress a alert after acknowledged so that the alert does not keep firing off while bringing the link up and down for maint or testing.  In detail, there are several nodes that are listed and I need to supress the alert for the individual node that is in maint or testing.

snowjay · Answer

Interesting ideas, you have given me something to look into. I use a combo of the built in alerts and the alerts beta. For simple up/down alerts the built in engine is a tad easier to set up quickly.

But I wonder if I can create a custom property for each person and set it as a yes/no field. If yes then they get an email, if no, then they don't. Then I can show who gets alerted on the node page under the custom properties and also I can go to custom property editor and highlight and change a bunch of nodes at once.

I can have my email admin create me groups but it doesn't help when one group gets alerted for all the nodes in a group and then one other person needs to be alerted on one of them. Email group or not, that still two alerts defined.

Network_Guru · Answer

Hi Snowjay, 
 
I'm not sure if you are using the regular alerts or the new Beta Alert Manager... 
My alerts are still using built-in alerter & are based on location, so that I can get the alert suppression to work. 
 
In your case, I would use the new Alert Manager Engine. 
Some ideas to try: 
 
 - create a new custom property for each e-mail account, 
then add the persons e-mail address to the approriate nodes. 
Use a macro in the "send to" field of the alert (if this will work?) instead of their e-mail address. 
Now you can manage the alerts using the CPE web interface, by adding and removing the e-mail address from each node. 
 - use a similar method but send to mailing lists created by your mail admin, instead of individuals. Then have the e-mail admin add or remove the users as they come & go. 
 - using this method would allow you to use Report Writer to track who is being notified for each node. 
 
Of course using the Beta Alert Manager you can base the alerts on custom properties. You can uncheck the "[field]owner = [value]db" property in the alert when that group is doing work on their servers.
However, as you mentioned, you'd still have the problem managing alerts when one group is used in multiple alerts.

-=Cheers=- 
 NG