The new web based alerting introduced in NPM v11.5 / SAM v6.2 is really cool (Great video available here to learn about Web based Alerting). One of the new Alert Actions is to set a Custom Property value. Custom Properties are tremendously powerful to filter dashboard resources, organize dashboard resources the way you would like, restrict user cases, limit reporting data sources, etc etc. Which got me thinking - I could essentially build custom property "policies" using this new Action.
As a simple test, I created a new Custom Property called "DeviceClass" with some drop-down values like Servers, Routers, etc
I did not assign values to any of the Nodes
Then, I went ahead and created an Alert that looked the following
Properties: (although evaluating every 1 minute is an overkill here)
Trigger Condition:
(Click on Show List to see which Nodes will meet your criteria)
Reset Action:
(reset after 1 minute as there is no reason for the alert to stay active for ever)
Trigger Action:
And hit Save!!
Instantly, all my Windows servers had their DeviceClass custom property set to servers. And, will continue to do so for any new Windows servers that are added for monitoring.
I hope this simplifies managing custom properties for you!
