I started using SolarWinds (as my British colleauges might say tongue-in-cheekily: "in anger") not long ago. It's been deployed at work for a couple years at least, from what I can gather. One of my current goals is to integrate AutoSys (enterprise scheduler) with the monitoring/alerting/fixing.
First I wanted to pull in a parameter value (known as a global variable) from AutoSys; see: Monitoring via custom Java code. After fiddling with a PowerShell "shell within a shell" command I could pull in the values that we typically set to the strings UP or DOWN as a custom property with Boolean or Yes/No True/False settings. There's a third state, like "not a number" if the interface fails for some reason which I suppose I'd need to default to whichever state makes sense.
We use these globals to hold automation from running, such as when an application or system is down for maintenance. Makes more sense than the overly simplistic "midnight to 2AM" blackout periods that are often a built-in feature. This way can be done on a scheduled basis, or via dependenices, or someone could take the variable "down" to resolve bottlenecks, etc.
The 0/1 state of yes-or-no-ness:
On an aside, it would be nice to have left axis values of 1 or 0 instead of decimals and negative numbers.
The custom property, defined in a parent:child relationship in order to not alert on say, disk space, when an install might use the entire disk when it runs.
It worked like I wanted, to a limited extent, as I hit a few bumps. I've read that the parent of the group needs to be singular, or alarms might skirt this gate. And, the custom property does not look like it scales a lot as I've seen this example show up in other places. A couple hundred settings might turn into noise if variables cover many apps. Last, when I set the variable back up from the AutoSys side the child disk volumes have remained in a grey/unknown un-monitored state. Of course, that could be for other undiscovered reasons.
I'm supposed to ask a question here, since that box above is ticked. Am I doing this right?