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Add support for node aliases to better support multi-tenanted environments

Many of my clients are MSPs with multiple customers, and many of these customers have their own internal naming convention for their devices, and want my clients to use the same name. This poses many problems:

  • Node names requested may not be easy to understand, making it difficult for the MSP NOC staff to pinpoint related issues, and slowing down the MTTR for related incidents.
  • Node names requested may give privileged information away, which could compromise device security.
  • Multiple different naming conventions further complicate the NOC workload.

To resolve this problem, my feature request is:

  1. Add a new optional built-in filed for nodes called 'Node Alias', which is displayed on the 'add node' page when adding single nodes (and can be edited via 'edit node').
  2. Amend the current Orion system scripts to look for node name OR alias, controlled by:
  3. Add a new check box in account settings for 'Use Node Aliases', which when checked will display the contents of the alias field rather than the node name.

Having this would mean that the MSP NOC can have their own node name, using a consistent naming convention, for all customer nodes, and a customer whose account is set with aliases enabled will then see their own node names.

This way everyone's happy, and since the underlying code has been amended to support the new variable, all built in resources could be used on customer views who are using alias names, as they have been changed to display either node names or node aliases.

Disclaimer: I raised support case #825229 with support before raising this request, and it was confirmed that currently there is no way to do the above without using reports/custom SQL queries, which is untenable due to resource requirements.