Duplicate and disable all out of the box alerts in bulk

sturdyerde

Question: Does anyone have a script that can duplicate and disable all of the OOB (out of the box) alert configurations in bulk?

Problem: We have done a LOT of work to make the pre-existing alerts more informative and useful. The OOB alerts are valuable because any important alerts are already setup when the product is installed--and yet their value is greatly diminished by the terrible decision to simply copy/paste the alert name into the alert's 'message' field. OK, there are several problems here... After every platform update (you'd think we learned by now), all of our meaningful customizations to the OOB alerts are completely lost.

I hate the bloat, but the only solution that my team and I can think of is to duplicate all of these default alerts, disable the originals, and edit the copies...then hope that the next update doesn't re-enable the default alerts! How do you all handle this? I'd rather not have to do this process 100 times. On the side, I'll be looking to create or bump a feature request around this. Thanks!

brscott

Once I went through and looked at all of the OOB alerts, I disabled all of them and started creating new alerts from copies (or eventually from scratch) to do exactly what I wanted.  I was always afraid that they would overwrite the default alerts on each upgrade.  I have been through several upgrades, and they have not yet re-enabled the alerts I disabled.  I have seen new alerts added and they were enabled.  Like now, I see about 5 enabled new alerts that were probably added in the last upgrade, that I need to disable.

Also as a tip, when you create your alerts, consider prepending all of your custom alerts with the same prefix so you can always tell yours from the solarwinds out of box alerts.