We are aware of and use the unmanage schedule but as far as I can see this is only for nodes.
Is there an equivalent for interfaces?
i see what you mean now, this is achievable to configure, you will be able to find some very useful information here: Unmanaging and suppressing alerts for applications - Scheduled recurring maintenance windows of course you will need to look for the Interface Uri rather then applications Uri but the idea is the same.
on a side note, i actually do something similar in SQL Agents with a small 'update' Script that will 'update' a custom property every day that suppresses alerts and removes objects from alerting outside of office hours to prevent spamming alerts such as backups etc... then another 'update' script once back in operational hours to bring the object back "online" this has worked very good for me and some of our customers without any issues.
tbh, the first method of the two is a more desirable soultion. if you can configure this in windows scheduler then that would be the way to go, for me i would actually like to use the 'Date/Time' Custom property some how to manage the scheduling..
little tip: if you dont want to create a 'SQL Agent' job or only have Express like one of our customers you can actually do a cool little trick using the "Time Of Day" feature in combination with the 'Trigger Actions' 'NPM Event' where you can wrap an 'update command' in a SQL variable.
as an idea, i have an alert trigger action, that will trigger and automatically update the impact of the node so when an alert fires it will reduce the impact of the node and raise a ticket with a lower severity based on the alert type, you could use something similer to upadate a mute custom property, but note, this doesnt utlise the 'Supresss' Feature...long story why i had to create this method and comes down to ServiceNow event managment ..
${SQL: SELECT 'Alert Mappings NPM Event Trigger';UPDATE nodes SET n_impact = CASE WHEN n_impact = '1 - High' THEN '3 - Low' WHEN n_impact = '2 - Medium' THEN '3 - Low' WHEN n_impact = '3 - Low' THEN '3 - Low' END WHERE NodeID=${NodeID}}
you have a few ways but depends on what you are most comfortable with..
you should be able to do this through 'manage nodes' or 'interface Details' widget. im on NPM 12.3
Thanks for the reply and yes, indeed you can and, perhaps I should have been clearer with my post....!
I was looking specifically to be able to schedule regular up / down (or on / off) of monitoring which is something maintenance mode doesn't do. It will do a 'one off' but not repeat it daily / weekly / etc...
Some intersting ideas there and just convinces me that I need, along with others here, to get into scripting / SQL / et al.
The problem we have is that not a one of us started off as a dedictaed monitoring engineer or DB person and all come from a hardware background. That is further compounded by the fact our prior tool allowed us to do all of this from a GUI and whilst we acknowledge Solarwinds is far more powerful we hadn't realised just how much scripting or DB knowledge would be required to do what, as far as we are concerned, should be a simple task.
This will take me some time to get my head around but I truly appreciate the reply.
