There are many ways to send alerts with Intermapper. Get into the details of alerting with Intermapper and acknowledging your alerts.
Transcript
Send alerts whenever Intermapper detects a problem. Send alerts by email, SMS text, or pager. Execute a script or restart a server. Here's how:
Intermapper has a great graphical user interface, but you may not have the resources to sit and watch your maps 24/7. Use Intermapper's notifiers to alert you to problems. First, I'll create a notifier. From the edit menu, I'll choose service settings, then I'll click notifier list in the left pane. This is where you create and edit notifiers. I'll add a notifier. This is the notifier creation dialogue. From here, you specify who is going to receive an alert, how they are going to receive it, and when. You can alert someone many different ways. This is the default notifier and email notifier.
Enter one or more email addresses in the box to specify who is going to receive the alert. Choose other notifier types with this dropdown. Besides sending email, you can send text messages to cell phones or pagers, or play sounds. In addition, Intermapper can send an SNMP trap to another management system with information about failures, alarms and warnings. It can even receive an SNMP trap and send alerts based on thresholds of values in the trap. You can also send alerts to Syslog servers, pop up a window on a Windows machine, or execute a script or a command on the host machine. This could be useful for rebooting a server, for example.
Click and drag here to set the hours and days during which this alert can be sent. Click the edit message button to edit the message that gets sent with the alert. Use a rich set of variables to customize the message with specific values from the device. As you can see, a number of these are used in the default message. Once you've created a number of notifiers, you can create a group notifier or you can select notifiers you've already created, and alerts will be sent to all recipients whose schedules permit. So a group notifier can be set to be sent 24/7 but the individual notifier's schedules override the group notifier. To make sure the notifier is working, click test notifier.
In order to use notifiers to send alerts, you have to attach them to devices. I'll select the icons for the devices I want to attach the same notifiers to, then I'll right click one of the selected devices and choose notifier's window. So now you can see a list of notifiers and which ones are attached to this set of devices. A shaded check box indicates that the notifier is attached to some of the selected devices, but not all.
Click check boxes to choose the status threshold that triggers an alert. You probably want to send an alert when a device goes down. In some cases, especially with remote devices, you may want to send an alert when the device comes back up. For devices such as work stations or servers, you might want to send an alert when the device enters a warning state, when a disk is starting to get full, a UPS reaches a certain temperature, a printer's toner is low, or when an SNMP device sends a trap.
Using Intermapper's notifiers, you can move from managing your network reactively to a proactive approach, fixing problems before they reach a critical state. Use the delay, repeat, and count columns for a number of purposes. If, for example, a particular device tends to bounce up and down for short periods of time, you can eliminate false or unnecessary alerts by setting a delay. If the device you are pulling every 30 seconds stays down for say five minutes, you can probably assume it's actually gone down so an alert is appropriate. Use the repeat and count columns to specify how often and how many times you send an alert before you stop. You can combine the three columns, for example, to escalate a problem.
I'm going to set this notifier to repeat every minute for a count of five. It sends an alert to Jack every minute for five minutes, then stops sending them to Jack. Then I'll set a delay of ten minutes on the notifier that sends a message to Oolie. I'll set up Oolie's cell the same way. If Jack doesn't acknowledge within that time, the problem is escalated, sending an email alert to Oolie's email address and a text message to his cell phone. Once you're aware of a problem, there's no reason to continue sending alerts. By acknowledging that a device has a problem, you can let others know that you are working on the problem and subsequent alerts are suppressed.
Acknowledge problems using Intermapper remote access or do it directly from the Intermapper server. To acknowledge a problem, right click the problem device and choose acknowledge from the context menu. For a basic acknowledgment, enter a comment and click okay. This comment is written to the event log file. Notice that the device turns blue but with a check mark in the corner. The device is down but shows that someone has taken responsibility for the problem. If you choose a basic acknowledgment and the device comes back up after being acknowledged, it turns the normal color. If it then goes back down again, the icon turns red and alerts are sent again. You can also send basic acknowledgments through the Intermapper web server.
Use the timed acknowledgment to suppress alerts for a specified period of time. If we're working on this device and know it's going to go up and down over the next five days, we don't need to send alerts during that time. In this case, the device turns blue but has a wrench attached rather than a check mark. This indicates that it's in maintenance mode. Unlike the basic acknowledgment, if the device comes back up, it turns its normal color. But if goes back down during the specified period, it goes straight to the blue acknowledge state. No alerts are sent and the wrench reminds you that alerts are being suppressed.
Let's say I have a server that connects through a switch to a number of work stations. Intermapper is monitoring both the switch and the work stations connected to it. If one of the work stations becomes unreachable, I want an alert to be sent. But if the switch goes down, everything that's attached to it may become unreachable and I don't want an alert to be sent for each device. You can define this relationship by setting the vantage point. Right click or control click the icon that represents the Intermapper server and choose set vantage point from the set info submenu. If the switch goes down, the work stations are in the shadow of the switch and are unreachable from the point of view of the server. The icons for the work stations that depend on the switch are grayed out and all notifications for those devices are suppressed until the switch returns to service.
That's alerting and creating notifiers in a nutshell. For more information, see the user guide available from the Intermapper's help menu.
