A simple one, and one with a niche use, but very handy nevertheless.
Imagine this, dear reader. Your boss asks you to remove a node from Orion, RIGHT NOW! Easy enough, I hear you say. But wait! Your boss has some provisos:
- You are required to remove the node from Orion immediately!
BUT - That node had an important application template assigned to it, the metrics gathered by that template have commercial value and must be retained!
Well, right now, we can't do it! As soon as you remove a node, any application monitors are also removed, thereby removing the metrics gathered by them!
So, in order to facilitate this kind of request, I propose the following addition to SAM's burgeoning feature set:
- Add a check box to the application template design process, which allows for the user to specify whether the application monitor persists upon the digital death of it's parent node, ergo saving the metrics from oblivion.
The proposed 'Application Metric Persistence' setting, if enabled, will persist for the same period as your configured detailed stats, but can be changed to anything supported the Orion retention limits, or left indefinitely if required
In addition, each Application monitor will need an "Original Parent Node" property, which is set to the node name the application monitor was created on, allowing users to find the undead app via Global Search. The parent node will be changed to a dummy/system entry specifically created for this purpose (I'll use 'DELETED' here, for ease of use), with the original parent node appended the end, making it easy to search for, and allowing for the Orion admin to add a node with a duplicate name later down the line, without complaint from the system or confusing SAM searches.
For example if NODE1 was the unfortunate parent, the new pseudonode name would be DELETED-NODE1.
To conclude, I'll explain where the idea for this FR comes from.
Over my years as a consultant, many times have I been asked "if I remove this node to free up a license, can I keep the historical metrics from the application monitors? The answer has always been "no", or, "no, but if you back up your database BEFORE you nuke the node, you can restore it in dev, and view the results that way".
Clearly the latter is not an elegant solution. I believe the above is a better way.
