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Dependencies - if parent goes down - status of all children = unknown?

I have never setup dependencies and what to get a better picture of what they will accomplish. We have a remote network with a significant number of nodes. If the link goes down we get flooded with alerts that all the device are down when it's always been the network link. Would creating a dependency on the router as parent effectively mark the status of every child object behind as "unknown" and not trigger any alerts (assuming the alerts are looking for status = down)? What about WPM tests?

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wiszm23

If you create a group for all of your remote sites and make that group dependent to the interface on the router that goes down when the link goes down they will all be labeled as unreachable. I would assume WPM would know if the site is not reachable that it will suppress the alerts also, but I do not know that for sure.

anthony.os

I have a group call it "SITE_A" that contains several nodes, some of which have application monitors on them. I nested these as children under the router interface to this site as the parent. When I view the option "alerts on child" it does not show anything. We don't have any special alerts for the nodes. Basically we just rely on the global rule for any node being down. But the application monitors with alerts configured are specifically tied to node. Should the "alerts on child" menu be blank, and it only lists items when the parent is down? Or does it mean under my configuration that no alerts are being suppressed? If the latter what am I doing wrong?

anthony.os

I setup a basic test using 2 non-production nodes. I made SERVER_A the parent node, and SERVER_B the child node. I shutdown SERVER_A and was alerted that it was down. Now I expected that any issues with SERVER_B would be supressed if I shut it down given it's parent SERVER_A was down. I proceeded to shutdown SERVER_B, and I did receive an alert for it. When I view the dependency properties and view the "alerts on child" menu which states "when the parent object i down, alerts on the child will be supressed" it shows me 3 alerts:

Alert me wehn a node goes down - Advanced

Email me with a node goes down - Basic

High Packet Loss monitoring - Advanced

I received the email notification that the node when down; why was it not surpressed?

The manual doesn't really explain how this feature is supposed to function; it just describes the steps for creating the dependency.

wiszm23

The alerts on child will display any alerts that are present on the child sites. If none of the child sites are down, nothing will be displayed there.

wiszm23

I believe if Server_A goes down then Server_B should go to the Unreachable mode. I am not sure how SolarWinds reacts when that child does not go down. Usually the dependency is to suppress alerts when everything behind the parent will go down at the same time. If you have a switch and it goes down SolarWinds suppresses all of the port alerts because it knows they can't possibly reply because that switch is down. Another example would be if you have a hub and spoke topology in your network and a hub goes down, everything connected to that node would go down at the same time. To make it easy, you could create a group of all of the spoke sites and make the group the child under the hub router. When the hub router goes down, all of the spoke sites would go down but because they are children of the hub they would be marked as unreachable and not generate an alert.

I hope this helps.

anthony.os

wiszm23 - I now understand that alerts on child will only show content when active alerts exist. But why did I receive an email notification (alert was triggered and not supressed) when the parent node was down in my example?

There are two ways to supress alerts; through dependency and through the alert supression setting within the individual alerts. Do I need to configure both of them? I assumed the dependency was a global way to surpress alerts rather than having to manually update all the indvidual alerts.

jerewats

Hi,

I am having a similar issue with my setup. Essentially I have a building entry switch as the parent node with two user access switches as the child nodes. We simulated what would happen if the power were to go off in the building and instead of getting one alert from the parent node, we got 3 alerts. One for each of the switches in the building.

Basically, I'd like to only get one alert for this. Did you ever find out how to fix/work-around this?

superfly

Basic Alert Manager shouldn't be used anymore. Open it up and remove any rules that you still have in there. And then test it again.

If Server B goes down at the same time as Server A, then the alert for Server B would be supressed. But if Server B stays up and Solarwinds can still get to it, then it may report on it separately. I've not tried this. All my group dependencies are in cases where if the parent fails, the child nodes are unreachable.