Denny LeCompte Sr. Product Manager, Orion SolarWinds Austin, TX
-=Cheers=-NG
---Orion V8.1 SLX, SLX secondary poller, SQL2005 x64 SE, 14GB Ram, 12k+ elements and counting--- ---Orion V9.1 SP2 SL2000, SQL2005 Express 866 elements and counting---
Vic CatoTechnical Lead - Network OperationsKoch Business Solutions - Enterprise Technical Services
Using the Custom Property editor I have added a "notes" field for Nodes and Interfaces, and added them to the respective views. The purpose of this is to allow my NOC clients to add information pertaining to status. I have also set up Advanced Alerts to trigger off of keywords in "notes"; such as the word "removed." When a node has the word removed in the notes field an email is sent to myself and my backup Orion admin letting us know to remove the node from Orion. The interface notes field is predominantly used for recording Service provider ticket numbers and at the end of the month it is also useful in validating SLAs with the carrier from a MTTR vs. ticket perspective.
Additionally the notes are extremely helpful for the NOC staff in preventing multiple analysts from working on the same issue at the same time; they just put their name in the notes to indicate they are performing the initial problem determination. My biggest demand was for the NOC to be able to Acknowledge down devices/interfaces, as a former manager of the NOC, I have first hand experience with that and I couldn't even begin to count how many times someone acknowledged an issue yet nothing was done... The standard answer was "I took another call." (etc...)
The one downside to the notes field is that I had to check the Allow View Customization box for the NOC staff. Not only did that take a while in the Account List (I miss the old Account Manager on the server), but it opened Pandora's box in that the Edit Resource Icon is now usable from a NOC client perspective. Sure enough, even with graphical instructions, the very first person clicked that instead of the Update Notes button.
John J. Times Systems Management & Automation Enterprise Technology Infrastructure SunTrust Banks Inc. Live Solid. Bank Solid.
I warming up to the Content Sharing Zone, still a little cumbersome :)
When viewing specific nodes (our switches) I would love to have the MAC address and the IP addresses their associated with linked to the port. I plan on doing this myself (if I have to) but it would cut into my Counter-Strike time and I would rather not do that. :-)
My work around for the visible Edit Resource Icon:
Backup the existing image first: C:\Inetpub\SolarWinds\NetPerfMon\images\SmallButton.Edit.gifThen replace it with a tiny 5x5 pixel transparent image.
5x5 is pretty hard to hit, but its still there for the Admin
I described this in the old forum but I'll rehash it here in case someone didn't see it.
I've customized alerting so when viewing a node in the interface you can see who is being alerted on it and then if you have admin rights you are able to select/unselect who is being notified.
To do this I created custom fields (yes/no) for the nodes each with the name of the person to be alerted along with an "alert" field so you can turn of monitoring of a particular node. Then using the advanced alerts I created an alert rule for each person. The rule is simply if "alert" is checked and the users name is checked and the node is down then alert. Reset is the same rule except the node needs an up status (obviously).
Then on the node status pages I inserted a custom fields section and checked off all the users names that I added as custom properties. Their names show up with "true" next to them if they are getting alerts, "false" if the were getting alerts and now are not and wont show up at all if they were never selected to see the alerts.
In that section I also created a link to an edit page which is a page I created that allows you to modify the yes/no status of each custom field entry allowing you to select and deselect people to be notified.
Now this only works for the up/down status of the node but could be easily migrated to included monitored interfaces but I didn't do that as not everyone here needs to know that type of info. Most people just want up/down unless you are in the networking group. So for now I just use basic alerts for the few people that need/want to get notified of interface (or application) status.
I always wished I could of set up alert groups and then assigned them to each node (or interface) and I sort of accomplished that with this customization.
Hey John,
I posted something similar a while ago.
I also use a Custom Property called "Comments" for the OPS folks to use for ticketing info etc.As for the Pandora's box, I got around this by using the "Allow Event Clearing" property of the users account to allow them to add comments & custom Properties.
Have a look at this post - http://thwack.com/forums/p/274/2900.aspx#2900
Now that I can upload some .jpgs, I'll post some more pics of my customizations.
I see that now, and you usually beat me to these things... :) (this one by a year or more)
Both techniques will work, the main difference I see is that when a new release of Orion comes out yours will have to be re-hacked, where as mine "should" flow right in. Don't get me wrong, I like yours, but I am to leary and lazy for that matter to rewrite code.
I would like to have the ability to customize views based on the web server being used. We have two additional web servers, one sits on a DMZ with access to the internet and the other sits on a closed network with no access to the Internet. Due to this setup, I cannot add any live data pulled from the internet to any of my views since the data will not be availabe when someone is using our web server on the closed network.
