Better way to supress child alerts?

Question

So the only way I could come up supressing alerts downstream of a site router with was to set up a couple of alerts per site

Core Alert - has all the core devices, Router and Core Switch

Edge Alert - has all the edge routers and access points, etc. <- Supress alert when Core Router is down.

This approach is not giving good results..  This weekend had a location go down and got alerted about everything. Could have been polling intervals, so I just set all the edge devices to poll at 360 seconds instead of default 180 and left the Core devices at 180..

So is there a better way to handle this??

vhcato · Answer

You're certainly welcome.

There's no way to change the polling order, but then you really shouldn't need to do so. If your objective is to suppress alerts for a particular group of nodes that are dependent upon another device, then the alert should be configured to trigger when a child node is flagged as "down", and suppressed if the device upon which it is dependent is in either a "down" or "warning" state. With this configuration, the only time you should get an alert for a child node being down, but the parent node is up, would be if the parent node is bouncing, or if poll responses to this node are inconsistent. Of course, that is if you have the same poll rate for all devices involved. If not, that must be considered as well.

It's not foolproof, but it works; for the most part. :)

tbackus · Answer

Thanks vhcato..

So the next question is how do I tell what order things are being polled and can I change that order??

vhcato · Answer

How do you have your conditions configured? If you are only suppressing if the parent is "down", you may want to consider including the "warning" state as well. Depending on where your devices are in the polling order, you may have child objects flagged as "down", while the parent is still noted as being in a "warning" state, thus alerts will be triggered for these child objects.

You may want to look at the following post.