RSS Feed for Active Alerts

I know this has been requested before but I think it slipped off the radar screen somewhere along the line. It sure would be terrific if there was an RSS feed for the Active Alerts in Orion.

It's funny how a company that runs such a powerful community system that has possibly hundreds of RSS feeds, hasn't incorporated this simple feature into their own product.

denny.lecompte:

How would this fit into your life?

Good question Denny. Our administrators have a myriad of devices and programs that they use to monitor various RSS feeds. The help desk staff specifically requested an RSS feed so they can more easily monitor not just when something goes down, but when something comes back up. These people are not first responders so they prefer not to be bombarded with emails. For this task, most the help desk staff either use the RSS reader gadget built into Windows Vista, or the Good News RSS reader plug-in for Trillian.

Our off duty System Administrators carry Windows Mobile devices, and yes they get email notifications about what's going on. The complaint from them is that they would like a more holistic view of what's up/down so when they've been away/out of of the picture, whatever, they don't have to go through 20+ emails to figure out what's up/down, and what needs their attention. I know it sounds like a flaky problem, but sometimes you're away from the office and would just like to see the current active alerts, not necessarily those from an hour ago. They all use NewsBreak to keep up on our other community notifications from our SharePoint Portal. It just makes sense to include Orion alarms, since that's what's most important to them.

Speaking of Share Point. Management above us has requested some simple way of viewing what's going on. These are the type of people who couldn't be bothered to login to Orion and don't want to deal with the constant barrage of emails. But these same people work/live inside Outlook 2007 and SharePoint 2008. Both of which have excellent RSS readers, that are both simple and easy to use. Perfect for these people.

I can't keep an eye on the network all the time, but I try. I'd love to integrate the Orion RSS feed into my Samsung LN52A650 with InfoLink, as well as my Chumby (Yeah, go ahead, laugh). There's just something comforting about rolling over before you go to bed, or just as you wake up, knowing what the status of the network is.

Have I provided enough examples? I could keep going :)

It seems every device these days supports RSS. Seeing as we'll probably never see an Orion optimized interface for Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry, iPhone, (or Chumby) this seems like a terrific standards based method of providing Orion integration into a world of products.

I'm not sure what I would be willing to give up in terms of sacificing development time for an Orion RSS feed, but I can also see this being useful.

We have a large number of people running the web console all day just to keep tabs on 'what's going on' (mainly management). Having a lightweight RSS feed would keep these guys happy no doubt - and off our systems (we are also big Sharepoint users even if they don't want mobile updates).

As noted above - it would also provide the Ops guys a better (quicker) view of the Network status without having to access the web console.

Dave.

I will second an RSS Feed system of features, but I'd like to include MORE than just alerts.  I would find benefit in having RSS information available to our IT staff, who are all Blackberry users and utilize RSS applications for security updates (cisco, microsoft, etc.).  I also have interest in SharePoint Users", as aLTeReGo mentioned.  I've ALSO felt a WAP compliant interface to Orion would be a huge benefit.  If my Orion server possessed some browser agent detection scripts, and when I was accessing via Blackberry, it directed me to custom, predefined views for "WAP Browsers", I'd put Solarwinds on the "list of people to send Christmas cards to" list.

In addition to alerts, the following RSS feeds would be useful:

Down Nodes
Events
Or, essentially "Any Resource". 

The resource may be some built in item, or a custom report, but the ability to turn any resource into an RSS feed would be gravy.

Here was my original request for this - 2 years ago:
http://thwack.com/forums/p/1715/6442.aspx#6442

Most of the top 5 features I was looking for are already covered here, but I just came across a cool idea.

I just installed RSS ticker on my PC.
Having Orion generate a custom XML RSS news feed would be a great feature.
You could then keep one eye on the pulse of your network, without having Orion open all day.

It would need a tool to select what you see in the news feed.

• Last 10 nodes down
  
• Last 10 Syslog messages
  
• Top 10 Latency
  
• Top 10 Packet Loss
  
• Top 10 interface utilization
  
• Top 10 CPU utilization
  
• Top 10 Netflow talkers
  

Of course the admin could customize this to display any number & types of messages/info contained in the DB.

Since Orion already has XML Snapshots support built in, this should be a simple matter to port to RSS:
In System Manager - File > Advanced Settings > XML Snapshots