Alerting when a router or switch is down without using dependancies?

There may be some SQL wizardry that will achieve what you want, but I think you've hit the same problem as me. Short of defining an alert for every single site, I can't see a way round this currently.

In an ideal world, I'd like to be able to assign a custom property like 'NodeDependency' to each node, which would detail another node such as a router that is parent to the alerting 'child' node. If the Dependency is down, then don't alert for the child:

Trigger Alert when all of the following apply

     Node Status is equal to Down

Trigger Alert when none of the following apply

     NodeDependency is equal to Down

I don't do a great deal with groups, but the same would be true for this I believe. Separate groups and depencies per site and separate alerts also.

I'd be very pleased if there's anyone out there that wants to contradict my thinking and offer a suitable solution!

This *should* work.  Create a new Alert. In the Trigger condition, choose 'Custom SQL Alert' for the first drop down, and for the second drop down choose 'Node'. The first portion of the SQL is auto-filled. Paste the following (or equivalent) to the bottom half

, (SELECT Nodes.City FROM Nodes WHERE DeviceType='Router' AND Nodes.Status='1') AS Nodes2

WHERE 

(

  (Nodes.Status = '2') AND (Nodes.City = Nodes2.City)

)

so, it should look like below

I have added 2 node custom properties here

- City for the location of the node

- DeviceType which has drop-down options like Switch, Router, Server etc

The inner query generates a list of Cities where the Router status is Up, and the JOIN statement looks for all nodes in these cities where the status is Down.  If you want to use different custom properties like StoreName or something like that, simply substitute Nodes.City with Nodes.StoreName.

You will need to modify the trigger condition in the default node down alert as

NodeStatus is equal to Down

DeviceType is equal to Router

so that you get alerted when routers go down.

There may be other ways of doing this but this should be easy enough without having to create several groups and dependencies.

In the future, it looks like automated dependencies may be very helpful for you:

Re: What we're working on post-NPM 11.0