Monitoring is the strongest point that SolarWinds has going for it. But flip that and look at the management side of the software and it leaves more to be desired from a highly respected and rated software. If the software is packaged as a suit of both strong monitoring and management tools it would not just be easier for us administrators but also a win for SolarWinds.
1. Enhance Alerting abilities. Things such as ability to build escalations. Alert one goes to Noc, if not acknowledged with x amount of time, alert two skips NOC and goes to second level, if not acknowledged again, alert three goes directly to management.
2. Create a way for Repetitive alerts to stand out to help find chronic problems and resolve them. Maybe create a counter that shows how many times the alert was triggered and place a warning on the home page to alert of possible problems creating to many alerts.
3. Create an object or a page that would provide directions on what to do for alerts and whom to contact. Could also include on-call schedule. This is big as it would remove doubt and uncertainty about what to do when certain alerts come in. This is big for us as we have close to 30 alerts if not more and it becomes a hassle to mange via outdate print outs and having people try and remember what to do.
4. Since everything runs through NOC for us. E-mail isn't a priority unless it's a team asking for direct emails from solarwinds. But for our NOC they use the alert console to acknowledge and manage alerts. It would be best to have a redesign of this page to remove character limits for names and descriptions of alerts and allow more flexibility and add more functionality to the page. Should be a page where NOC can have all the information and function they need to properly direct tickets if they need to be created.
5. Allow conditions to be more functional and allow more complex conditions to be created. I've had to turn down requests due to the limitations that the current alerting engine has.
6. Allow actions to be more functional too.
Basically if SolarWinds would integrate a number of features from alert central to be part of NPM that would suffice alot of things for us mentioned above. And could probably be useful for many other users out there who are looking to have for effective means of alerting.
Same goes for reporting. Reporting should also be enhanced so that there is no limitations to the type of report one can create. Right now, because of how data is arranged in the database certain reports cannot be created due to this limitation. If reporting engine can read across multiple colums and fields and data sets in the database this would be a huge plus in allowing any kind of report possible to be created without having to figure out complex queries to get the job done.
Just an enhancement request I thought could be a win win for all.
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