I've always told my users any metric you see in NPM can be alerted on. Apparently that is not the case. My network team has asked me to alert on the number of active VPN users on our Cisco ASAs. The metric is called VPN RA Detail\Active Sessions and here is a PerfStack showing this metric across our ASAs. This is a default value collected by NPM, nothing custom here.
I am finding it challenging to configure an alert trigger condition for this metric. It simply is not available under the default counters available nor can I setup anything custom.
Under the default trigger conditions we only have VPN RA Session not VPN RA Detail.
Under VPN RA Session we don't have any counters for Active Sessions.
Under groups ASA Node there is a counter for connections but its all connections to the node, not Active VPN Sessions, the value is tens of thousands.
So I moved on to attempt to create a custom trigger. No biggie right? SolarWinds is "awesome" and has a mechanism for custom SQL and SWQL.
I poked around in the database and found the correct value that matches Active Session.
SELECT COUNT(SessionID)
FROM [SolarWindsOrion].[dbo].[ASA_RemoteAccessSessions]
WHERE NodeID=497
AND SessionStatus=1
I attempted to use custom SQL but the lovely developers decided to restrict what tables you can query.
There is no option for VPN RA Details in the drop down.
If I try custom SWQL there is an option for VPN RA Session but not VPN RA Details. So still not Active Session column. Close but fail.
So I attempt to make a completely custom macro to trigger off. Under Avanced if you choose User value/macro you can have the option of building a custom SQL variable.
But I can't get this to work. I cannot find any documentation or examples on how this is supposed to be formatted.
I have a case open with SolarWinds support but they are terrible at anything custom like this once you get off the beaten path. Their suggestion was to build a SAM SQL monitor to query the SolarWinds NPM table. That's like monitoring inception. Is there a way I can build a custom alert trigger to use this value? Any help is appreciated.
