Grouping of objects for alerting

Question

Hi there,

We have just purchased Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor and I have be put in charge of setting it all up.

I have added all the nodes that I would like to monitor and can see how to group them via the AgentPort, community Contact etc. However when it comes to Alerting I am struggeling to work out how to get it to group correctly.

As an example, we have devices in many different countries. They all have the same community string, contact details etc. However we have multiple Departments that need to be alerted when their device goes offline. Our naming structure is xxxyyzz999 where xxx is the company code, yy is Site code, zz = device code, 999 = Device number. The problem is they all have the same Company code so I can't sort via name. People in Australia don't want to be notified if a device in Europe goes down, and visa vera. However they do want to know if their device is offline.

If there a way to create a group and add devices into that group and then set alerting to that group. Eg: AU-Devices, EU-Devices, etc.

I hope this makes some sort of sense.

Regards,

Bogor

Network_Guru · Accepted Answer

Welcome to the Forums Bogor & the world that is Orion.

Grouping is one of the main features of Orion.
This can be accomplished with the Custom Property Editor.

You can create any custom property you like and use this for alerting, reporting and many others.
Using a combination of properties, it is possible to setup alerting suppression with custom properties as well.

Example

create a CP called Tier and another one called site.
assign a value of 1 to all backbone devices, 2 for Distribution Routers & 3 for access switches & 4 for servers
assign a name to all devices in one site behind a BB router

Now create an alert for all your access switches in one site such as this:

alert on any - node status = down and site = xyz and CP - Tier = 3
but not if node status <> up and site = xyz and CP - Tier = 2

This will suppress down node alerts for your access switches in site xyz if your DR's are not up.
Note: this last part is important as it covers the polling intervals so that your should get very few alerts through before the suppression kicks in.
What this means is the alerts will also be suppressed if the DR status is Warning or Unknown
You should poll your DR's & BR's more frequently than your access switches in any case.

HTH