Scheduling unmanage task for nodes, interfaces and applications

This is post #2 of our Orion NPM 10.0 Sneak Peak series, consider the following scenario - every Saturday at 2am we have a policy to reboot xyz devices.

Today, a user would have to go in weekly and setup a unmanage task within web node management in the web console.  With 10.0, this will become much easier as you will be able to define recurring unmanage schedules or recurring maintenance windows. For folks unfamiliar with the concept of “unmanage” (a very Orion specific term), this in essence allow you to define a time period when a node, interface or application will be down and you do not want to receive alerts on or have it show as down in the UI.

When you install or upgrade to 10.0, you will need to go to the additional components of the SolarWinds Customer Support portal where you can download this utility or if you are on the NPM 10.0 Release Candidate and want to check this out, send me a private message via thwack.  Once downloaded, unzip it into your SolarWinds/Orion folder on the Orion server as shown in the screenshot below.

Once extracted, open the Unmanage Editor.exe and you will be presented with a welcome and instruction screen as seen below.

Click on create a new task and select the nodes, interfaces and applications you wish to add.

Click add and select the duration or time period you want these item to be unmanaged for and select ok.

Now once you save the task you will receive a popup dialog indicating it has been saved and copied to the clipboard for use in an upcoming step.

So what does this produce on the backend when I saved it?  Since we are leveraging Windows Task Scheduler to handle the scheduling, this creates a .cmd file which has the appropriate switches and parameters Windows Task Scheduler needs to execute this.

You can either manually navigate to the Windows Task Scheduler or click on the Open Windows Task Scheduler within the Unmanage Utility and click on Add Scheduled Task.  As you walk through the wizard, when you get to the step to select the program to run, navigate to the /Orion/UnmanageUtility/Tasks folder and select the .cmd file you created for this job.

These next dialogs walk you through setting up the start time, date and frequency and which account to run this under.  This is a Windows account, not a SolarWinds account.

And that’s it.  If you want to edit an existing job, you can go into the new unmanage interface and select edit and choose the job you wish to edit and then save it.  If you want to change the frequency or disable the job you can do this with the Windows Task Scheduler interface.