Help: Execute NCM Action when Alert Triggered to send “sh tech” to engineering staff

Question

We are using: Orion Core 2012.2.1, SAM 5.2.0 SP1, NCM 7.1.1, NPM 10.4.1, NTA 3.10.0, IVIM 1.5.0

I’m trying to configure a trigger action for a %CPU utilization alert when one of our Cisco Cat 4506 core switches exceeds a CPU utilization for 95% for 5 minutes.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to have the trigger action work to have a “sh tech” from the switch send an email with the “sh tech” file to members of our engineering staff…but I’m open to suggestions.

When I use “Execute an NCM Action” to “Execute Config Script” and enter “show tech” in the “command script to execute” field, the system sends the output to the “Configuration Management page on the Orion Portal, but when I click “Script Results” the output appears in a pop-up window, but I’m unable to close the window (IE 8 locks up).

I tried executing the following command:

show tech | redirect t10.8.0.150/techsupport.txt

But NCM returned the following:

%Error opening t10.8.0.150/techsupport.txt (Timed out)

show tech | redirect t10.8.0.150/techsupport.txt

% Incomplete command before pipe.

Can anyone offer a more elegant, better solution?

I’d like to be able to forward the output of “sh tech” to our staff if CPU utilization exceeds 95% on one of the Core switches…the best solution would be to send it via email, but a good alternative would be to send a link (url) to the file itself.

Thanks

- Steve

mrxinu · Answer

I've created NCM scripts in the past that have written their output to a file in a directory directory so I could scoop them up later with another script (i.e., .txt). If you configured this NCM script that way you'd know that the latest tech support output for that device was out there on the file system and you could get a link to the file out to the tech. As for cramming it into the DB, I think the 'memo' custom property that would have allowed for the large text storage has gone away in the most recent version AFAIK so your options are limited there. When you say you want to forward the 'sh tech' to your staff, are you talking about someone who has access to the SolarWinds web console?

steverunner · Answer

Steven:

Not a silly question at all!  That might be true; I'll look into it now.  The bigger question is to see if there is a better way than sending "sh tech" to the Orion TFTP server...it would be better if it could be sent to the SW database (although, I understand the size of the output is problematic).

For now, I'm alerting on the high utilization and including instructions on "tasks to manually perform" in the event of high CPU utilization on any of the Core switches.

Thanks!

- Steve

mrxinu · Answer

Forgive me if this is a silly question, but the error in NCM says it's timing out - is that particular system able to access that 10.8.0.150 server's TFTP service?