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HELP with dynamic grouping

Hi,

I am new to solarwinds. As of now, we have our Sys Admins receiving all of our solarwinds alerts and then they forward the alerts to the respective owners. I am trying to make this more efficient and get it to where each department receives their respective alerts. To do this, I need to leverage dynamic groups. We are a small team so automating as much as possible is important. Right now, for the alerts that go to our DBAs, we just input each server one by one into the alert. As new servers are created, it is tedious to go into each and every alert and modify it (that's if we remember). I was hoping that with dynamic grouping, I could automate the grouping of servers by their hostname. The issue I found is that each condition you add in the dynamic query editor is treated as an AND statement, not an OR statement. In the query editor I am doing Orion Object | is | Virtual Machine then the condition is Name | contains | SQL. This query would put all of the servers that contain SQL in their name into a group, but we also have database servers with DW and DB only in their name. If I go to add another condition, as I mentioned, it is treated as an AND statement and then fails to return any results. I then created some dynamic queries one by one for a group and that seemed to work. Only issue I am having now is that we have some servers that meet what the query is calling, but really shouldn't be in the group. For example, server name PRODWEB (web server) and PRODDW (data warehouse). Both meet the call for any server that contains "DW". By creating the queries separate, there is no way to keep a server like PRODWEB from being added to the group unless you can filter it out by the dynamic query that is calling for DW servers, but I don't know how to do that since there is not a "does not contain" condition. I tried with the "is not", but no luck.

Currently, I am trying: Name | is not | '%WEB%' (hoping that it'd pull every server that does not contain "WEB" in it's name) then,

Name | contains | DW (to then filter through the remaining servers and be left with all the DW servers I want).

Open to any advice on how to alert more efficiently or how to better manage groups of servers instead of our manual process.

Thanks in advance.

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Accepted answers

mesverrum

When doing things like this in Solarwinds you will make your life a LOT easier if you don't try to key in in naming conventions for your rules/alerts/whatever. Go to the settings page and click Manage Custom Properties. Create a new node custom property that you can use to identify the servers.

Create a custom property

-Marc Netterfield

Loop1 Systems: SolarWinds Training and Professional Services

LinkedIN: Loop1 Systems
Facebook: Loop1 Systems
Twitter: @Loop1Systems

All comments

mesverrum

Create a custom property

-Marc Netterfield

Loop1 Systems: SolarWinds Training and Professional Services

LinkedIN: Loop1 Systems
Facebook: Loop1 Systems
Twitter: @Loop1Systems

n.mueller18

This makes much more sense. I never knew this was an option. Thank you.

mesverrum

As far as your points about trying to automate and streamline your processes, you can use the alerting engine to set custom properties and i think that would be pretty easy to do in this case. Write a rule that says basically what you were describing above, name contains sql or name contains dw but not web, and also have it check that the custom property you created is blank. When you get to the trigger actions section select the action to set a custom property and have it set the property you just defined. Let that rule run a couple times a day it should be able to help take some of the admin burden off you. I tend to set up lots of rules like that so I don't have to police my custom properties so much.

-Marc Netterfield

Loop1 Systems: SolarWinds Training and Professional Services

LinkedIN: Loop1 Systems
Facebook: Loop1 Systems
Twitter: @Loop1Systems

cnorborg

This feature request might help!!