Time of day alerting

Question

We currently have a number of sites spread across the country that have different opening and closing times.  Site opening and closing times change based on the day of the week - with occasional changes for days like public holidays or other special events.  Also, twice a year we need to change the times due to states that don't have daylight saving time.

I'm setting up my alerting so that we don't alert (or at the very least we supress email notifications) during times when the sites are not open.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an easy way to set this up, apart from creating alerts for each site, with alert time schedules for each day of the week in every alert for a site.  So right now, if I have 5 different alerts, I need to create these alerts for each site and then a time schedule for each day of the week for each of these alerts.  So with 40 sites, that's 200 different alerts and then 1,400 different alert time schedules.  Then when daylight savings hits twice a year I need to then change half of these.

Is there an easier way to do this?

Two things I can think of that would help would be saving and reusing Time of Day schedules when creating alerts.  i.e. When choosing the Time of Day when creating alerts if you could just select schedules that you have previously created that would help.  And then if a schedule needs to be changed, then you would simply change the schedule and it would be valid for all alerts that use that schedule.

Another way that this could be easier is if you could set custom properties for opening and closing times and compare those to the actual time (and day of the week somehow).  That would then remove the need to have a separate set of alarms for each site.

If anyone has any ideas on how to accomplish this with the least number of alerts and time of day schedules that need to be created I'd appreciate it.

jamesatloop1 · Answer

I know what your looking for and it is extremely complicated situation. I cant give you the ultimater solution on this one but certainly make your life easier. To start create a new custom property fro all your alerts.

Then you can use it here.

Then you can also put in a timezone constraint if you wish under the trigger condition along with your custom properties so it will take the time from the device.

This way you can minimise the amount of alerts being created but would still require one alert per site as opposed to all alerts for all site,

drothwell · Answer

Hi James,

Thanks for your reply but I'm not sure we are on the same page here.

I have used custom properties to create different alerts and conditions for each site so that I can send alerts based on the opening times of that site.  I have used the time of day schedule and or the email schedule to create the hours during which we should send alerts.

The problem is that I need to do this for 40 sites which means I need to create each alert 40 times.  At this stage I have around 5 different alerts, however this will likely grow.  So right now this is around 200 alerts that are needed.  Each alert needs a schedule for each day of the week.  Each one has to be created individually as you can't save and apply an existing schedule within the Time of Day settings in an alert.  So this is 1400 schedules that need to be created.  Half our sites are in states that don't have daylight saving so twice a year I need to change the schedules for 700 alerts.

Thanks,

Deryck

jamesatloop1 · Answer

Hi Deryck,

Very simple. You just have to set your conditioning to the relevant devices in your trigger conditions. You can use custom properties to to group the relevant devices and create the alerts trigger condition under advanced. If you are not comfortable with custom properties, you could create multiple conditions  and use instance of under the 'select field' for node, application etc.... and then select the network objects you want to alert on.