Six years ago, when I first joined this community, the Orion product was using the term "Alerts" to describe the rule sets that would cause an Alert to trigger. In many places that is still the case today. The same term would also represent the associated triggers caused by those Alerts. To me that was confusing and so I adopted the term "Alert Rules" to discuss, with my staff here, the Alert rule sets. I don't like doing that since my term would then creep into conversations with SolarWinds and cause confusion there. But I felt it was the best of two evils.
As the Orion product suite evolved, about a year ago I believe, the term "Alert Definition" was introduced but the old term still lingered as it does today.
I then thought SolarWinds was on the right path to correcting this. I adjusted my terminology from "Alert Rules" to "Alert Definitions" and thought all was good. Figured eventually SolarWinds would adopt the "Alert Definitions" term throughout.
But wait... Looking in the database for something, I ran across a new term of "Alert Configuration" as in "dbo.AlertConfigurations". Looking in that table we find all of the Alert rule sets. Both those that were delivered with the product (canned) and possibly adjusted plus those we created from scratch. OK... But there is also a "dbo.AlertDefinitions" table. This one contains those canned Alert rule sets as delivered with the product and before adjustment.
Now we have the same term, "Alert Definition", used for 2 purposes bringing about confusion when you jump between the database and website.
So my feature request is for SolarWinds to decide on one term to use representing the Alert rule sets and then update, throughout Orion's database and website, to reflect that same term for consistency. I prefer them to be called "Alert Definitions" personally and that seems, on the surface anyway, to be the easiest to move to. It would require that the current "dbo-AlertDefinitions" table be renamed to something like "dbo.CannedAlertDefinitions" or something however.
BTW: To be consistent, I think "Reports" to define report structure should also be changed to "Report Definitions" as well since reports are really what is produced as a result of the defined report structure.
