As user jklandes points out, it would be very valuable to have a node's status change based on a custom alert or other action - say via UDP.
His example - a UDP can be easily added for an APC UPS, and can effectively notify via trap or email when a battery has gone bad or needs replacing.
An even better indicator, however, would be to enable the change of node status from green to yellow or red based on this poll status.
Thanks for your attention!
Updated with a more approachable method from jklandes:
"I don’t think adding a function to change the status of the node from an alert action is right approach and it’s probably why the feature isn’t provided today. The real issue as I see it isn’t so much setting the device status when the alert is true (you can configure a trigger to do this fairly easy), it’s how to correctly set the new status later when the condition clears. The status of the node is really an aggregate of multiple inputs, not just the UDP status, so you could not simply add a “Set Node State Green” action to the Reset Action of the alert definition – a completely different trigger (more than one, probably) would be needed to set it correctly based on all the other conditions that would go into determining this node’s actual status.
What makes more sense to me is to enhance the UDP to support optional alarm states for the UDP based on values for the data returned within the UDP - the UDP would essentially have its own status as a part of its definition. Now think of the UDP like it’s a dependent of the node – just like a port. Port statuses are merged/integrated onto the status for their parent router or switch. Why not treat the UDP the same way? In fact the same red box you see for a port alarm in the console would work nicely for the presentation element – just enough that it stands out. I think this would be less clunky than the Alert-based approach since it would be integrated within the UDP definition and possibly be faster to release from a software development perspective since it would leverage existing code to handle port alerting in the web interface."