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Critical systems alerts to generate help desk tickets

Hi, all-

We have certain systems monitored by Orion that we have deemed "critical", in other words they count towards our downtime metrics.. What I'd like to do is have Orion send an email to our helpdesk to generate a ticket whenever we get a critical systems outage. As I'm sure you all know, this could create a massive number of tickets when a network leg goes down, or during patching and rebooting of multiple systems.

What would be ideal would be a system that sends a generic alert email to the help desk system whenever any critical system goes down, whether it's 1 critical system down, or 50 critical systems down.. It would be throttled so that only 1 email goes out, say every hour.

I'm guessing I'm not the only one with this challenge and was wondering what genius ideas you all have come up with to do the above.

Thanks much for your time!

Jim

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Accepted answers

All comments

mharvey

Since the alerting sends out on distinct elements, there's not a way to get an alert to send only 1 email if 50 systems go down as opposed to one email per system. That's just the nature of node down alerting. Now, having said that, the closest you'd be able to get would be a group alert where the group status triggers an alert, however, you run into an issue that once triggered, you won't be alerted if other members of the group have issues during that time. Depending on the ticketing system, you could simply have the alert email the ticketing system directly as we do with Service Now. While yes, critical systems going down can lead to a lot of tickets/emails, we'd rather have the barrage of tickets/emails then having 1 email/ticket that could potentially go overlooked.

jim.cobb

Thanks! Groups sounds like a good idea.The techs still get bombarded with alert emails, but I just don't want the helpdesk queue to get hammered by a large outage. We had it setup that way before and it was a mess. Have you used Alert Central? I thinking that may be a solution for this.

mharvey

I've used it a couple of times, but have not been a fan of it overall. Something you may want to look at is using dependencies. This may help during times of large outages by setting a specific device/link as the parent, and in the event of it going down, all child objects will go into an unreachable state and not trigger the alert.