ON CALL/AFTER HOURS SUPPORT

Hello

Wondering how other people deal with On Call or After Hours Support for alerts in Orion. We have 2 SysAdmins. One person is designated "on-call" each week. We want to be able to send after hours alerts only to this person. Obviously it is not efficient to change each alert every week. We do not use Exchange so cannot set up an On-Call group there that would need to be changed weekly.

Does anyone else have this problem? How do you deal with it?

Thanks.

Find more posts tagged with

Alerts

Accepted answers

All comments

BryanBecker

Karen...I feel your pain trust me. I'm the lead of 10 network engineers and we rotate oncall every week. I do exactly what you said is "not efficient". I go in each Monday and up date 3 alerts to change the email address of the oncall engineer's cell phone. We do have an internal system that has the oncall rotations and I'm looking at a way to leverage that or come up with another way. I can't blast the messages to everyone.

Thinking outside the box here...in an idea. Id start with have the ability to put in an email address (for paging) in the Orion account manager. From there I could have drop-down boxes in Orion (maybe under the admin section) where I select the oncall engineer. With that Orion inserts that address into the alert that pertains to that team. That's very high overview and I could get into more detail with SW if they are interested. But I think this would allow you to customize your alerts and assign an oncall person based on different criteria like time of day, etc.

BB

KLH456

Glad I'm not the only one who needs this functionality. When I asked about setting up email for groups of staff I was told to do it through Exchange. That's fine except we don't use Exchange and I can't do it through our LOTUS Notes. Seems, Orion should have a staff database and perhaps a calendar function where you could assign on call. It would then check the calendar for the day/week and make that the person on call to receive the after hours calls. I know other products we looked at had this capability and I was surprised to find that Solarwinds did not have it.

Have you put it in as a feature request?

qle

I'm a bit surprised that Lotus Notes doesn't support the ability to send e-mail directly to a group's address. So if you had a group called SysAdmins (whose members are the sysadmins), can you send email to SysAdmins@berk-tek.com that would automatically be distributed to whoever is in the group? Instead of Exchange, we use GroupWise here and it certainly supports this feature.

Network_Guru

Have a look at what Snowjay did here:

and here:

KLH456

It isn't that Lotus Notes doesn't support this feature. Our Lotus Notes is adminstered by our Corporate Headquarters in France and getting anything changed there is almost impossible. I have asked that one group be changed so it can receive "outside" email but it has still not happened. I am hoping to work with our HR person here who is supposed to have the ability to make this change. However, he is not sure how to do it so I'm not sure how far I will get. But, the real issue I'm asking about is the On-Call situation. I suppose I can create an On-Call group that we would need to change each Friday but that can be a pain. Idealy we would like a calendar where we can schedule the On-Call for say 3 months and the alert would pick up the correct name from the calendar. I know I am asking for a lot but I have reviewed other Network Management Systems that have this capability. In the meantime, I'll keep trying to get the groups I need in Lotus Notes, although even that seems a wasted effort because we are going to Exchange next year. My hope is that whatever groups are created in Notes can be carried over into Exchange without too much difficulty.