I thought I would share this with the forum as an effective way of testing alerts. While the built in test feature for alerts is very handy, IMHO it is not a complete test as you can only test on one node at a time therfore you cannot test suppression or know that polling is actually taking place (this only works for up/down alerts however)
Back in the day we had a buggy version of another monitoring application where the software would stop polling but you would be unaware that this had happened so instead of taking a device offline to test I began simulating outages by entering in bogus route statements.
From the Orion server I add a fake route so say my core device is 10.1.1.1 and I have 20 supressed nodes also on the 10.1.1.x subnet from my the command prompt I add a route to the IP of my server lets say 192.168.1.1
route add 10.1.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1
Once this route is in place anything on that 10.1.1.x subnet will appear to go offline and this allows me to test the following.
That my polling is taking place
That my alerts and actions are operating correctly
Supression statements if configured are operating
And occasionally just to test my NOC teams responsiveness (yeah I know its cruel but without fire drills what happens when you have a fire)
After all is good I then remove the route route delete 10.1.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0 and all my reset actions should take place.
I know this is alot and the reason I am sharing this is because I have gained many useful tips from this site I thought I would share one I use on a regular basis.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
