'Anytime changes' in Advanced Alerts

Question

In basic alerts, you can configure many items to send notifications, "anytime a value changes".  (See screenshot)  How is this accomplished in Advanced alerts?  There is no such option in the conditional statements.  I really need this feature in advanced alerts.  The benefit of advanced alerts is you don't have to manually go in and select which nodes this alert applies to, which become cumbersome as you add/remove nodes on a monthly basis.  Very quickly, you realize you've forgotten to apply certain (basic) alerts to recently added nodes and you have to manually go through the enable/disable process for thousands of devices.

I need the ability to use advanced alerts, where I can provide conditions that make this apply when I want it applied, based on custom property.  However, there is only "contains", "equals", "less than"...type options in the trigger/reset conditions.  There needs to be a "Anytime value changes" option in the conditions.  This is a key requirement for me.

vhcato · Answer

I agree. That's the ultimate goal. I have the same concerns as you, but until such time as something like this is available natively within the product, the time savings, flexibility, and decreased complexity involved with the administration of Orion is well worth the few moments it takes to implement this work-around (at least for us).

chris.schear · Answer

vhcato,

Thanks for the response, but that seems way too involved.  I'd much rather see Solarwinds development address this through a software change and actually including an "anytime a value changes".  I used this type of Basic rule for IOS version changes, Last Boot, etc.  I don't want to keep these as basic alerts because I have to manually select which nodes the alerts should include, and that leads to error as with multiple administrators, undoubtedly someone will add a new node and not remember to "add it to the IOS Version changes alert", etc.

Solarwinds needs to address this in the advanced alerting.  It's beginning to look less and less like an 'advanced' alerting system, and more of a 'less-featured basic' alerting system.

vhcato · Answer

Chris, this has been brought up before, and I don't believe it can be done within Orion natively. The only way I've been able to come up with to make this work is to create a custom property, then create a SQL job to copy the value from the database field you want to track into this new custom property field. Then, using a "complex condition", one can create an advanced alert trigger that compares the collected value with the value that was last copied to the custom property field. The trick is to have the SQL copy take place less frequently than the collection interval for the monitored property in question, and have the alert compare these values with a sufficient frequency to catch the differential. Does that make sense???