What custom properties are you using, and why?
alert recipient email addresses--initially because there used to be a limit of approx. 220 characters in alert utility GUI (probably in 2012). I had to update too many alerts too often so I just started using a custom property
device type/ team/ regional gateway
I treat CPs in two ways:
It's all about stripping the onion that is your monitored estate down into the logical layers that represent your business areas, and using CPs to represent them
As silverbacksays mentioned, they are used everywhere. There are common ones like site name, site number, contact person, alert email address, alert muting, etc. I've also used ones like volume thresholds, latitude/longitude for automated world map population, patch windows for scheduled unmanagement, etc. Those are just the ones off the top of my head that I've used in the last couple of months. I'm sure there are a ton that I am forgetting about.
It's funny, a recent client I was working with kept asking off the wall questions about ways to do different things. It seems like all of my answers involved creating a new custom property. I asked him at the end of the day if he got how powerful custom properties were and his answer was a resounding yes.
We use custom properties in many different ways.. here are some examples:
These changes let us reduce our number of alerts definitions from well over 50 down to 20. And our alert actions are greatly reduced as well.. This really helped in the management and control of our alerts.
Before we used this integration our teams were trying to manually set/update fields in multiple systems.. This streamlined things and reduced the duplication effort. It also gave me as the admin more control since far fewer people needed node management access, etc. We are planning to expand this further to include automated node setup/removal and flowing information back from Orion to our inventory..
If you are not using custom properties I highly suggest you take a look them - There is countless uses for them and they will undoubted make your Orion monitoring better!!
We've used them while migrating peering links from one DC to another. We would mark all the links to be migrated, along with the connection name and AS number. At a pinch we could run a report for all currently connected ports that were marked as to be migrated.
As we proceeded with the migration the number of ports on the report would keep dropping.
Our second useful custom property was for transit links, we could record what the commit level was, again for easier reporting.
Along with this much of the standard location etc, as mentioned above.
Geographical location
Device owner
Service owner
Device grouping
Alert muting
Finally and probably the most painful NCM scripting. It is only painful because interface custom properties cannot be referenced within NCM which ends up being a huge drawback for me since I I would like to use the interface properties in my remediation scripts.
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