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Preventing Alerts when Orion Server NIC down

I was wondering if Orion NPM software can be configured to not send alerts if server access to network is down (NIC down or Offline)? If yes, is there a document How-To showing how to prevent the alerts from being sent once network recovers. There should be a way to prevent 100s of false alerts being created due to first network hop failure. If this is a built-in hidden feature of rules I would like to know this as well.

I have created, but not tested yet a suppression rule to monitor servers interface but that only works for trigger for monitor type interface.

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Accepted answers

ebradford

CPerry,

If your database is on a separate SQL server, then this should not be a problem. As far as I understand it, Orion needs to be able to access the SQL server in order to create an alert. If the Orion server NIC goes down, it won't be able to contact the SQL server and therefore won't be able to create an alert. Err... maybe the alert does get created, but just not entered into the database... either way, the event record would not be created.

As I tell my manager, "If it didn't get recorded, it didn't happen." hehehe...

However, if you want to have a better suppression rule, I would suggest Node Status instead of interface status. Node status should always be available. The node I would monitor is the switch to which the Orion server is connected. If the switch is reachable, then don't suppress. If the switch is unreachable, then we can likely conclude that the alerts are most likely caused by the server's inability to communicate, therefore suppress.

Although not part of your original question, it seems appropriate to bring up the idea of a text-paging alert over POTS for use when Orion can not communicate, when the e-mail server is down, and when the core switches are down (roughly anything that would prevent a valid alert from being sent out or received).

All comments

mrxinu

I understand the essence of the question, but NPM can only know if an interface on a system is down by asking the system via SNMP. Do you mean the NIC on the server or the server's access to the rest of the network? You could suppress a node down alert, say, if its access switch were also down.

ebradford

CPerry,

As I tell my manager, "If it didn't get recorded, it didn't happen." hehehe...

mrxinu

Ah yeah, I like ebradford's answer better. I misread what the OP was saying.

FormerMember

Thanks

Test for directly attached node will work, couldn't see the forest becuase of the trees. I was thinking about out-of-band alerts which would make it important not to alert if Orion servers connection to network was down, would hate to get 400 + alerts to the pager if Orion thought all nodes were down when only its connection was down.

On the lines of SQL being on separate box (which mine is), is Orion able to send alerts out-of-band or email if conection to SQL is down? Or is Orion functionality dependent on SQL for everything?