Events vs Alerts

LatteLarry

I'm very new to Solarwinds\Orion and I inherited the application, so I apologize for the rookie question... I am struggling to understand if I need all of these out-of-the-box alerts enabled in order to show the health or see events of a node. I care mainly that a nodes log all events (Critical -Informational), then to set up alerts for specific events that need to be escalated. From what I'm seeing, it looks like Alerts have a much bigger role than just alerting. It seems alerts are used more like jobs or tasks?

superfly

Welcome! This post would have been better in the Network Performance Monitor part but I'll answer your question.

You do not need to enable every single alert, it's entirely up to what alerts you wish to receive. But on the alerts you do use, you should have them enter an event for it. The reason is that the events stay in the database for longer. Alerts come and go. Events get created without necessarily having an alert create them. For example, when you create a new node, an event is created for this.

I would start with the basic alerts such as node down, interface down, high utlisation, hardware issues etc. After that you have to finetune and add more as necessary. Whenever you have an outage and you weren't alerted for it, you need to create an alert so next time the same outage occurs, you will be alerted.

Hope that helps.