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Copying Alerts

I just discovered that the copy alert feature does not actually copy the list of monitored
objects. You have to go through and reselect all the objects which the alert applies to.
Not sure if this ever worked correctly or broke in one of the recent updates, but it is
a real pain when you have a list of over 500 objects to go through to select the ones
you want.
Since there is no way to sort the list of alerts in the scrolling window, I thought I
would just copy various alerts so that they would be listed in a specific order at the
bottom of the window. I then deleted the originals, only to find out I just created a
whole bunch of work for myself

As requested previously, the alerting interface could use an update a la Report Writer
or Custom Property Editor. This would make it so much easier to manage. Plzzzz ?

-=Cheers=-
NG

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iunderwo

I'm with you 100% on this! The alert engine is really pretty far behind considering the leaps and bounds taken by other components of Orion.

Sorting alerts would be very useful, as would a report-writer style of interface to select what to alert on and more importantly, who to send the reports to. Granted, this would require a major reworking of the underlying alert engine...and that might mean it would need to be a separated from the performance monitor based on complexity alone.

The amount of work alone to maintain the alerts is pretty high, which is why I don't have all that many of them to begin with.

// Ian Underwood - Service Management
// Level 3 Communications

iunderwo

So, I started thinking of a way that this could be done...and here's what I thought of.

How about SW build an application called "Alert Builder". This app would be similar in form to the report writer, but it would generate the alert conditions that the polling engine could use. To do what the bulder would complete would undoubtedly require a rewrite of the alert engine, but a builder could compile a list of current alerts and feed that to the poller.

That should be easier to implement in the short-term.

The Alert Builder could be run nightly, similar to the maintenance, or when specified by the system admin.

// Ian Underwood - Service Management
// Level 3 Communications

Network_Guru

All the alerting properties are already in the database, so this shouldn't be too hard
to do. I don't see this as a huge change in the alerting engine.

I've tried to create a report in report writer to show me what alerts are setup for which
nodes, and to whom they go to. Sadly my SQL skills are rather lacking, so I can only see some of the data. The alerting data used to be in one table, but now it is in 3
separate tables - Alerts, AlertActions & AlertSuppression. The 3 tables must be linked
together in the query with the Nodes & Interfaces tables to create a meaningful report.

It shouldn't be too difficult to create a query based on the above report, which populates
the appropriate database tables with the alerts you want to generate.

-=Cheers=-
NG

ryoungpe

Creating the dependecy list can be a lot of work. I have had to build a spreadsheet and label the rules. I would like to see something like traceroute build a list of dependent nodes that could be used to build rules and be imported.

I agree that there needs to be some method of finding which rules a nodes is associated with. We have a lot of add, moves, and delettion of sites.

off: 281-209-7833
mail: richard.young@bakerhughes.com

iunderwo

I was thinking that a Rule Builder application might be the most efficient way for the poller to work on the alerts. While it's not a really big deal for the web engine to consult the database every time a search or report is needed, the frequency which the poller would need to consult the database would end up being a large drag on the system.

Periodically reading a rule table wouldn't be a bad idea, though. An external application would probably be able to build a pretty complex set of rules too with a lot more ease than is currently available.

// Ian Underwood - Service Management
// Level 3 Communications