My new alerting structure and suppression help.

snowjay

I'm currently changing my alerts from a "device group" structure to an "individual" structure using the Alert Beta

I am doing this by creating custom fields with peoples names. If those names are checked for a particular device the individual gets an alert. This allows me to supress alerts for a particular device via the web interface using another custom field I called "alerts_enabled". Plus all this can be manged thru the web interface and I can show who is getting alerted for which device on the Node details page.

So I basically have alerts set up for each person that say:

- If node status is down
and
- if alerts_enabled is yes
and
- if username is yes

then I send an alert to that user.

It seems to be working quiet slick and its nice to be able for others to see who also gets alerted (it will stop alot of questions coming to me) and I wont have to do digging thru several different device group alerts to see who is getting what.

I also plan on adding a "interface_alerts" and "volume_alerts" custom fields so I can alert on those things for just specific devices.

Now my problem is setting up some dependency/supressions. Years ago I used Whats Up and they had it on a per device basis, when a dependency failed not only would it not alert but it wouldnt even poll that device. Slick, which Orion did that but it doesn't, well at least not yet.

I'm thinking of setting up 2 maybe 3 custom fields called Dependancy1, ...2, ...3. And in those fields I would add the upstream device names, or things that particular node is dependant on.

Now, how do I make those into a supression? Ideally I'd like to be able to say "If the value of Dependancy1 node status is down" then suppress the alert. I'd also have rules for 2 and 3.

Is there anyway possible to do that? Ideas?