RE: [WhatsUp Forum] Recurring Alert Notifications

[John Tolmachoff \(Lists\)]

Title: Message

I am new to WhatsUp Gold, but I have an idea. What about having another WhatsUp Gold user do a simple external monitor for a small monthly fee?   John Tolmachoff MCSE CSSA Engineer/Consultant eServices For You www.eservicesforyou.com   -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dana Smith Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 10:51 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [WhatsUp Forum] Recurring Alert Notifications   Robert -- we could use a cell phone. I think a separate monitoring site is better for a number of reasons:   - Everything involved in the scenario I described is separate. No single point of failure can be unintentionally designed in or creep in over time. - The monitoring, if done properly, would be done from a customer's or "outside" perspective. It is easy to in error configure monitoring of say, internal vs. external/DMZ addresses such that even though the service is down, the monitoring still indicates it is it up. - Sort of included in my first point but worth specific mention: if the primary WUG server dies, there is a second one there to monitor the primary's health.   These are just some examples of why a separate server is better than a cell phone. Of course a cell phone has its place and can be used effectively. Monitoring is like security in that there is strength in "depth."   DS -----Original Message----- From: Goodwin, Robert [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 12:13 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [WhatsUp Forum] Recurring Alert Notifications Why not just get a Cell phone to make the modem call?   -----Original Message----- From: Benedict, Jeff [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 8:11 AM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: [WhatsUp Forum] Recurring Alert Notifications   It's not called being a worry wart, it's called CYA !!!  :-)   I guess you could also setup the Text to Speech interface and have the speakers turned up REALLY LOUD and have it yell at you!  HAHA     --------------------------------------------- Jeff Benedict Tech Services Lan/Wan Support 228-214-5465 -----Original Message----- From: Dana Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 11:04 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [WhatsUp Forum] Recurring Alert Notifications I have a "disaster" scenario in mind whereby a backhoe takes up the conduit to our building which would take out all telecom services to our building. I'm planning to have another office running a separate copy of WUG and monitoring our main site... just need a separate mail provider to add some redundency for the other office's notifications.   Call me a worry wart.   DS -----Original Message----- From: Benedict, Jeff [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 11:57 AM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: [WhatsUp Forum] Recurring Alert Notifications Dana, we resolved this too.  We send out 90% of our alerts via smtp email.  We monitor both the SMTP Server and our "internet" site.  If we can't see either one of those, then we have an alert go out the modem.  Most areas pager companies will give you the Terminal Phone number and settings to setup a Pager Alert. It works pretty slick.     --------------------------------------------- Jeff Benedict Tech Services Lan/Wan Support 228-214-5465 -----Original Message----- From: Dana Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 10:44 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [WhatsUp Forum] Recurring Alert Notifications I see your point. One of the concerns I've had is the problem of having our monitoring site disconnected from the rest of the world so WUG is not able to send out notifications. This issue falls into a similar category, however yours is more of an escalation (consider it business process) issue than a technical issue to my mind. There are any number of reasons a notification can be missed. How many times are you going to retry a notification? What happens if the person who is supposed to be handling the notification is unable to respond. At some point someone else is going to have to be notified and pick up the call. Hopefully you already have this covered.   Thanks for clearing up the "recurring" functionality for me.   DS -----Original Message----- From: Burks, Jon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 11:32 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [WhatsUp Forum] Recurring Alert Notifications Recurring Notifications send a report for the ENTIRE Whatsup Gold instance and not a specific map or device. Depending on how your support organization is structured, do you want to send a report every (nn) minutes that say 10,000 devices are up and one device is down?   These support guys only want to see stuff that they are responsible for...in other words, the webheads don't care about seeing the Cisco router and switch stuff, the PBX guys don't care about the servers.   That was my point regarding enhancing the recurring notifications report to allow us to modify the report, allow us to send a report per map or per device. -----Original Message----- From: Dana Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 10:12 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [WhatsUp Forum] Recurring Alert Notifications I thought that's what recurring notifications were for -- sort of?   DS -----Original Message----- From: Burks, Jon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 11:00 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [WhatsUp Forum] Recurring Alert Notifications Jeff,   Thanks for the tip. I will try it. Seems like a lot of work to setup, but it appears to be the only viable option at this time. Perhaps IPSwitch can add a option to continue to send alerts every (nn) minutes until the alert is cleared or acknowledged on the console.   Guess no one has every encountered a support person claiming they never received or saw the alert for the device or service that is down? Then you would have to prove to them that Whatsup Gold sent them the notification by reviewing the Activity Log.   Regards,   Jon -----Original Message----- From: Benedict, Jeff [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 8:36 AM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: [WhatsUp Forum] Recurring Alert Notifications The only way I've found, in theory, to do this in current version (8.01) is to setup multiple "Regular" Alerts, one for each hour of the day. (In your case every 2 hours).  Alert 1 would be valid from 8a-10a, alert 2 from 10a-Noon, etc.... Once the 1st alert time frame expires the 2nd one will kick in and issue a second alert.  Hope this helps. --------------------------------------------- Jeff Benedict Tech Services Lan/Wan Support 228-214-5465   -----Original Message----- From: Burks, Jon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2003 6:00 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [WhatsUp Forum] Recurring Alert Notifications   Is there a way to resend a device/service down notification alert at a specified interval with Whatsup Gold? For example, a IIS web server has the WWW services down. A initial pager/email alert is generated, but for some reason the problem goes un-noticed and unresolved. Can WhatsUp Gold be configured to send another pager/email alert at a specified interval (say every 2 hours), until the problem is acknowledge or resolved? Currently, the only way to see the service down is by visually using the program console or web interface and seeing the pink device icon on the map. Unfortunately, a lot of us rely heavily on remote communications email, cell phone, pager, or RIM Blackberry devices. If you configure recurring notification reports to be sent, you will see the device listed with a service down (if you include down names). But, it does not specify the name of the service that is down (e.g. WWW - include down service name). The recurring notifications reports are great, but there is a lot of room for improvement...For example, rather than send a report for all open maps on the Whatsup Gold instance, allow a report to be generated for a specific map or specific device. Then these reports could be directed to the specific person or department responsible for the device or environment. Moreover, recurring notification would be enhanced if it could allow long format to be used in email reports and short format for pager reports. Or at the very least allow us to modify the format of the report similar to how we can modify the alert notifications using the system variables.   Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/whatsup_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/