More Detail in Edit Alert's "Show list"

Mike_Lomax

This is an issue with SAM Alerts that has existed forever and although I have mentioned it to SW, including through the UI Team, many times, they still have not fixed it.  Lets see if any of you have also experienced the issue and have a solution besides what I have tried, that hasn't worked.

When you configure an Alert (Alert Definition) on the Summary page, you have an ability to "Show list" of components that would trigger an Alert (unless Alerts are Muted) if you save the Alert configuration.  With SAM Alerts, the "Show list" option is not very helpful since it lists the Component Monitor name which would be the same on all Nodes using that Component Monitor.  Here is an example:

Note that all of the above, with the exception of the first one, have the exact same name so you cannot tell which of the Nodes the Components are related to.  Simply not enough information there to make this helpful other than the fact that you know something might trigger an Alert if the Alert configuration is saved.  Thanks SolarWinds!!!

To try to work around this, I tried adding ${N=SwisEntity;M=Application.Node.Caption}, ${N=SwisEntity;M=Caption}, ${NodeName} or ${Caption} to the name but these variables won't resolve to a Node Name:

Note that in the above, I currently have two Application Monitors with similar Component Monitor names as I am converting from old to new and that is why the "Caption" variable is only showing for some of them.

So my questions are:

• Has anyone found a variable that will work in this case besides the 4 I tried and listed above?
  • If variables will not work in the Component Name, I will open an Feature Request to have that ability added.
• Also, if anyone has another idea on how to accomplish what I am trying to accomplish here, I am all ears.  TIA

Mike

adam.beedell

Hi Mike, agreed, this could use an update for sure

Often I find for component alerts its better to alert on the application level even if it makes the macros a pain afterwards, just for noise reduction. If you do that you make other problems, but this particular one gets easier

Else you can do stuff like trigger a write to [a file or something] with ${N=SwisEntity;M=Application.Node.Caption} etc

Or what i'd actually do almost always is write it in SWQL studio first, where I can select as many columns of information as I want, then port it in to alerts once I'm happy (you can compare the trigger count in the final step to make sure you did it right. Which is still kinda the same problem but whatev. Or if you port into a custom SWQL alert you can basically just remove the remaining information columns as your final action.

You could also perhaps do something like give all other users an alert limitation thats "NOT LIKE WorkInProgress" and then let those alerts trigger without a action with the WIP limitation on.

Hopefully something there seems useful