Alert Suppressing

Good luck with your request friend!  I've not been able to find any way to have an advanced alert know that status of any other node other than the one that the alert has been raised for.

In essence you want to have Parent/Child relationships so you can only alert on the Parent node for a site, say the WAN router.  Unfortunately Orion doesn't support this kind of relationship system in the alerting system.  It's probably my biggest wish list item.

Maybe someone will prove me wrong and have an idea for you! I'll certainly be waiting to see!

I would like to see that as well...

Have you seen  this thread? 

The solution suggested by Network Guru in that thread is excellent but you've pointed the exact reasons as to why I have not implemented it myself. SolarWinds has indicated that it is on the roadmap to have some kind of intelligence included in NPM that will automatically determine dependencies. If my memory serves me correctly, a version with this capability will be delivered by the end of this year.

Keep in mind that this request is not new and was made at least a few years ago. Every few months, a thread such as this appears and ignites the fire again. Hopefully, *knock on wood*, SolarWinds pulls through and provides this feature this year.

Is there any chance that this post could help you? 

Alternatively, you could use a stored procedure on the SQL server to update custom properties automatically and alert based upon the status of the custom property ().  Not a SQL guru here, but you could do something like:

• Configure a custom property for each node in a site for "Down_Metric"
• Stored procedure looks for nodes in custom property "Tier 1" (your site dual routers) to check status.
• If one router in "Tier 1" is down, update custom property "Down_Metric" with "10".  If both routers are down, update custom property "Down_Metric" with "20".
• Configure alert for the nodes to only alert you if the custom property "Down_Metric" is greater than 10.

I'm not saying that it's not complicated and messy, but given the lack of many viable options, it might do the trick.  This is one instance where being able to update a custom property as an alert action would be pretty nice.

I haven't looked into this yet, as we are still getting our 9.1 instance off the ground, but I thought the following notation in the release notes for SP3 for 9.1 was quite interesting.

"- Custom property values may now be defined using variables, or macros, following the ${VARIABLE} format."

Depending on how these values are treated by the alerting engine, one might be able to suppress alerts based on the value of a SQL query in a custom property field of a given device by defining the custom property as ${SQL:SomeQuery}. Again, I haven't played around with this yet, but my initial thought is that one could probably use this mechanism to suppress alerts for downstream nodes when any one (or multiple) upstream devices were down by defining the correct SQL query as a variable for a given node. You would have to have some combination of custom properties assigned to all of your nodes that would allow them to be used as qualifiers by the SQL query, which is something we actually already have in place in our environment.

Don't know if it will work, but thought it was worth mentioning.

I LOVE custom properties... :)

Thanks for the input,

These options even though they look time consuming to setup just might get me what I need.  I may need to give them a shot.

I wish SW would just integrate better grouping and relationships rather then counting solely on custom properties.  Seems like management is wanting more and more alerting and reporting out of the system all the time.

This is for sure something we are looking at for a future release