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Thoughts About Dependancies

Here's my idea for quick and easy Dependancy rule for Orion.
I think the majority of remote sites are addressed like this:
- the site has a subnet, for example 10.10.1.XXX
- the Router at the site is .1
- Another router is .2
- the switches are .3, .4, .5, etc
- the server is .10 or something higher.

So, would it not be simple to have a tool that bases dependancies on IP address ascending order within the subnet?

Or at least have a SQL script to create the rules....

although I don't know the impact of having 500 more rules "show up"

Don Y, Any comments on this?

Don Barry
Aegis Mortgage Corp
Houston, TX

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Network_Guru

I think it would be easier to build a Dependency rule something like this.

Base the alert on a custom property such as 'site' or 'building';

If router 'ABC' is down, then don't alert me on any devices with custom property - 'site' XYZ and/or 'building' 1234. This shouldn't be too hard to do?

-=Cheers=-
NG

bleearg13

Nope...this is exactly how we've done it. We have a custom property of "DepLevel" that defines a particular level of dependency and set up rules based upon those dependency levels.

casmith32

bleearg13 - could you elaborate on how your are using this dependency level custom prop ?

bleearg13

Sure. As an example, let's say you have the following topology:


Orion Server --- Switch A --- Router 1 --- Switch B
                   |             |            |
                   |             |            |
                 Server 1     Router 2     Server 2
                                 |
                                 |
                              Switch C
                              |  |  |
                            Servers 3-10

A custom property is defined for Nodes called "DepClass" (Dependency Class). You can use levels of dependencies or name them with something descriptive. Here's how you could have them named:

Switch A DepClass: level1
Router 1 DepClass: level2
Switch B DepClass: level2
Router 2 DepClass: level3
Switch C DepClass: level3
Server 1-10 DepClass: level4

The naming convention can be changed to something more descriptive, depending on your environment, such as "remote-office-1" or "t1-router", or "lan-switch"...whatever works best for you. You can then create different suppression schemes depending on what you're monitoring. If you're monitoring your servers, you can create an alert with the suppression below:


Suppress Alert when ALL of the following apply:
   Node Status != Up
   Suppress Alert when ANY of the following apply:
      DepClass = level1
      DepClass = level2
      DepClass = level3

The above will not send alerts on the failure of your servers if any of the nodes with DepClass level1, level2, or level3 are seen in any state besides Up. There are obviously much more complicated scenarios you could set up and I highly advise that you think through each suppression or you could end up getting alerts that you don't expect, or none at all!

The nice thing about the new Alert Manager (I can't wait for non-beta) is that you can import and export suppressions and even alerts so you don't have to set this up repeatedly.

As for the original Orion alert engine...well, it leaves a lot to be desired and my alert suppressions at this time are pretty much useless because they're out of date and difficult to update on a massive scale.