Mute Solarwinds alerts during reboots/ maintenance windows

lucielina
Kilo Contributor

Wanted to mute Solarwinds alerts during our patch weekends when all servers are rebooted because they have to be and our mailboxes get flooded with Solarwinds alerts. I decided to use custom properties for this purpose. Here's what I did.

Login to the Solarwinds web console. Go to the "Settings" page, and then "Manage Custom Properties" under "Node *& Group Management".

Click "Add Custom Property", select the default of "Nodes" from the drop down, and create something along the following lines —

customproperties

Select the nodes you'd like to apply this custom property to. I chose to apply it on all my Windows and VMware nodes. Set the value to be "No".

customvalues

Now login to Orion Alerts Manager and pick an alert you'd like to mute during patch weekends. Go to its "Alert Suppression" tab and add a condition on the custom property we created earlier.

alert custom properties

alert custom properties2

And that's it, really!

Update: Not sure why, but the above didn't seem to work for me. So I added the Mute_Alerts check as part of the trigger condition itself.

new trigger

Note: If you don't get the custom property in Orion, close and restart it as an administrator (i.e. right click and do "Run as Administrator" even if you are already running it with an admin account). Not sure why, but until I did that the custom property didn't get picked up. You only need to do it one time; after that you can launch Orion normally.

Next time your server estate is being rebooted/ undergoing maintenance, login to Solarwinds webconsole and change the "Mute_Alerts" custom property to "Y" for a node/ nodes that you want to mute alerts for. Below I show how I will mute the alerts for all my Windows nodes.

Go to "Manage Nodes". Group by "Vendor" and select Windows. Then select all nodes. (The checkbox to select all nodes got blanked out in the screenshot below but it's easy to find).

apply custom property

Then click on "Custom Property Editor" to get to the screen below.

apply custom property

Here too select all the nodes and click "Edit multiple values".

From the drop down, change the value for "Mute_Alerts" to "true". Then save changes

1 REPLY 1

captainmonitori
Kilo Contributor

This is from an older blog post and we've had improvements in methods to mute alerts in SolarWinds since NPM version 12.



If you have just a few alerts and schedules then you can just time your alerts around your patching times:


Schedule when an alert monitors your environment



If your schedules are more complex then you can either create an unmanage scheduled task:


Scheduling Unmanage Task for Nodes, Interfaces and Applications - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help an...



Or call the SWIS API to set the new supress alert verb for a series of nodes:


Alerts · solarwinds/OrionSDK Wiki · GitHub



Extra credit if you keep your maintenance schedules in ServiceNow and invoke Orchestration or a Flow/IntergrationHub to call the SolarWinds API.



Extra extra credit if you have your patching systems set the operational status for each CI to Patching which then triggers the above call to the SolarWinds API to supress alerts.  



https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/jakarta-servicenow-platform/page/product/configuration-management...