Community: How do you use Basic vs Advanced Alerts?

Question

I am interested in hearing from both SolarWinds folks and the user community on this topic.

How do you use Basic and Advanced alerts? What circumstances are good for one versus the other type?

I will be very interested to hear your responses. Thank you.

MrSampsonite · Answer

The biggest thing I like about Basic alerts is the ability to choose which nodes it applies to via a checkbox which allows really fast selection of certain nodes. Advanced doesn't have this. If you want an alert to apply to only certain nodes you need to filter or suppress depending on preference. I know the benefit of advanced is that it grabs all nodes that meet the other conditions and doesn't worry if you add a node later. In basic you'd have to go to each alert and check the box for any alerts that apply to that node.

There's definitely ways they could improve both of these so that there is much less work required on our part, but I think it's been this way for the past 4 years or more so I doubt that will happen anytime soon.

lhorstma · Answer

I don't use basic alerts either. They don't span pollers so if you load balance devices from one poller to another you need to redo your alerts. The only instance I could see basic alerts being useful is on very small implementations, like if you were monitoring less than a hundred devices on just one poller.

byrona · Answer

I don't use basic alerts at all.  Advanced alerts are much more flexible and can do anything that basic alerts can do so I don't see a need to manage alerts in two different places.