ARG!! Application Monitoring & Advanced Alerts

aLTeReGo

I was REALLY hoping that upgrading to v8.0.1 would finally resolve my issues with the Advanced Alerting Engine notification of Application monitor events. The problems I was having with Orion 7x with Application Monitoring Pack and the Alert Manager Beta have followed me to Orion v8.0.1.

I have a few hundred applications being monitored across 70 servers. I want to create a grouped application alert. So when any application having to do with Exchange (about 12 processes/applications across multiple servers) goes down, a message goes out to the exchange admins. Then another application alert group for our DHCP/DNS (10 processes across multiple servers) goes down the Network Administrators are notified. Etc Etc Etc... This seems to work for a few complex notification rules, but for some reason some don't work at all.. Orion knows that application is down but the alerting engine doesn't know the application is down so it doesn't send an alert, or even list in active alerts. I can't even find a reason why some work, while others don't when they are written the exact same way.

Has anyone else had problems with the Advanced alerts in conjunction with the Application Monitor?

Rules are written this way

Trigger Alert when ALL of the following apply
-->Application Status is equal to Down
-->Trigger Alert when ANY of the following Apply
---->Application Name is equal to Application Name 1
---->Application Name is equal to Application Name 2
---->Application Name is equal to Application Name 3
---->Application Name is equal to Application Name 4
---->Application Name is equal to Application Name 5




----- Status Update ------
Well I've wasted an entire day trying to figure this out but I think I found the problem..

It seems that any time I include an Alert for an Application that has "update" in the name, the whole alert rule fails to work. When I remove all references to applications with "update" in the name in the alert rule, the alert works!

To further confirm my theory I added "calc.exe" as a monitored application on one of my servers. When I added the application I changed the "Application Name" to "My Update Service" and created the following Alert.

Trigger Alert when ALL of the following apply
-->Application Status is equal to Down
-->Trigger Alert when ANY of the following apply
---->Application Name is equal to My Update Service

Application monitor sees the application as down, but a alert is never triggered (nothing listed in "Active Alerts" - "Advanced alerts")

If I start from the beginning and follow all of the same steps above but change the "Application Name" to "Calculator" the alert triggers perfectly. I can reproduce this bug at will.

Seeing as though I have wasted 14 hours minimum on this problem can someone at SolarWinds please explain this bug to me? I'm dying to know!!

Should you run across this problem a workaround is to use "Process Name" - "calc.exe" instead of the "Application Name" when creating the alert.

dancoh

I did not know that "application monitor" was released for Orion 8.