Regurarly Scheduled Maintenance Periods

There is an "Unmanage Scheduling Utility" on the SolarWinds server. On my install the shortcut is on the Start menu under SolarWinds Orion > Advanced Features.

To quote from the software:
What you can do with the Schedule Unmanage Utility:

• Create a task to unmanage Orion nodes, applications, and interfaces for a custom period of time. An unmanage task can be scheduled to run on a schedule.
• Edit existing tasks to add or delete Orion objects or adjust the time period.
• Why use this utility? If you have routine scheduled maintenance that happens once a week, you can have an unmanage task that runs at the same time. Selected Orion objects will be unmanaged and you won't receive alerts from them during this period of maintenance.

Thanks for this.  I hadn't stumbled upon that.  And I appreciate your pointing it out to me.

But to Solarwinds I have to say:  This is one of the most bogus features of an NMS I have seen - a real hack job.  I have to go to two places to schedule this.  Length of time in the utility, time to start in Task manager, and yet another need for a login with a non-expiring password.  Plus, as far as I can tell, no way to easily see when regular maintenance windows are - something I think would be critical in a large systems environment - without getting one of the SQL guys to write a query.

Consider this a feature request.

If i add node in unmanage mode then it will stop accounting of node plus dependent application template right?

I actually agree with you. It is doable and it does the job, but to be able to easily schedule periodic maintenance on the front end and be able to see all schedules and affected objects in one place would be an awesome addition

There is always the Orion SDK option and running an external script to unmanage them. It's fairly easy and you have complete control over the whole process.

How do you achieve the following:

1. Visibility at-a-glance of all configured schedules and affected nodes

2. Ability to delegate this to service desk, similar as simple unmanage/re-manage operation (otherwords, how do you make it simple and user friendly for most engineers)

Thanks,
Alex

Using 3rd party automation tools and SDK scripts together. Not directly from Solarwinds. The people that do patching and upgrades at my place never touch Solarwinds directly but they wanted to be able to add/delete/unmanage nodes based on their own work flows. So if they want to take a node out of a rotation, unmanage it, install updates, upgrade software, restarts services, place back into rotation and then remanage it, its all done as a workflow.

Exactly! You did it your own way, it works for you - great. The point here is - this needs to be out of the box feature so that we can all enjoy this workflow ... well, unless you fancy publishing a detailed article how to achieve this with SDK and 3rd party integration (including source code)

FAO: ALL

Check this out - this is related thread/idea. Please add your vote for this feature, I am sure you have landed on this page for a reason:

Bumping this--it needs to be implemented and integrated with NPM's GUI.

Yeah this needs doing ASAP

I dislike doing this...