What are your favorite Custom Properties?

What are your favorite Custom Properties? We have our equipment divided into types and I'm working on adding branch numbers. Does any one use a field to descript the purpose of the equipment?

Parents
  • Yes, I've worked with many orgs that do this in many different ways. I like to try and standardise so that when it comes to the time that they want to integrate with a CMDB we can easily point the custom properties to the CI's in the CMDB.

    Some just use simple descriptions, some use codes, some use secure names provided by their security team, some even go so far in a very organised fashion to extend their naming convention to groups, maps, NOC views and custom property description fields.

    Sometimes i've resorted to a visual method instead of using custom properties, especially when i'm doing architecture work for other teams. I create a visio diagram of the infrastructure and then recreate it in Orion Maps. I then include all sorts of information on the map like location, description, useful info, photos, a whole plethora of useful stuff. Eventually SolarWinds becomes not just an observability platform but the central source of information / wiki too.

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  • Yes, I've worked with many orgs that do this in many different ways. I like to try and standardise so that when it comes to the time that they want to integrate with a CMDB we can easily point the custom properties to the CI's in the CMDB.

    Some just use simple descriptions, some use codes, some use secure names provided by their security team, some even go so far in a very organised fashion to extend their naming convention to groups, maps, NOC views and custom property description fields.

    Sometimes i've resorted to a visual method instead of using custom properties, especially when i'm doing architecture work for other teams. I create a visio diagram of the infrastructure and then recreate it in Orion Maps. I then include all sorts of information on the map like location, description, useful info, photos, a whole plethora of useful stuff. Eventually SolarWinds becomes not just an observability platform but the central source of information / wiki too.

Children
  • Would love to hear more about your customizations 

  • I think its critical to manage the expectations of the team owners of the views as they usually tell you what they want and you have to steer their focus so that you give them the most useful views possible. Custom properties are great but occasionally i've seen environments with hundreds of properties and that just gets silly. If you create and keep updating an Orion Map it can be a really useful induction tool for new starters and it can provide engineers and architects with invaluable visual representation of the application they want to focus on.

    Going back to the original question now that i've had time to think... I reckon the most important custom property is SVC_NAME as this a custom property that I use to define all nodes that make up part of a service and this is really useful to then tailor alerts per team based upon this service name. When combined with a service wrapper document (architecture diagram) and a team who want to make the monitoring solution a reality you can end up with a nicely polished solution that is truly useful. 

  • I've been using Applications, and ApplicationsRole, and AssignmentGroup in my custom property scripts for a long time and it falls into the same train of thought you are talking about. 

    Servers don't just exist for no reason, they are all supposed to be running some kind of application and there ideally would be someone in the company who is responsible for making sure that whatever that server is supposed to be doing is happening.