Solo Technology

Today’s Challenge

I use WhatsUp Gold at work to monitor our development and production environments. It works well for us and seems reasonably priced full featured (although I wouldn’t be adverse to looking into a comparable open source solution if anyone has suggestions). I’ve been using it for over 3 years now and hit my first real, “how the heck do I this” type question this past week.

A nice feature of WhatsUp is that we can configure different alert policies for the development and production stuff. In particular, for dev., we’ve defined blackout times on the paging. From 11pm to 6am, no pages will be sent for outages in the development environment. Face it, I don’t think anyone wants to be paged at 3am because a dev. server has been down for 5 minutes, right?

That works quite well, but what I really want is to learn about the outage after the blackout period. In other words, don’t page me at 3am, but page me at 6am after the blackout.  Then I know about it before everyone starts showing up at the office.  Apparently, that’s not a capability that WhatsUp offers. Nuts.

Work Around

For the moment, I have a decent work around, but not quite as desirable as I’d like. The blackout period is set on the pager alert. Normally that goes out after 5 minutes of something not responding. I’ve also setup an email alert to go out after a 20 minute outage — and that doesn’t have a blackout period defined. Thus, as long as whoever is on call remembers to check his email in the morning, we’re covered reasonably well. No page was sent, but if the device was down 30 an email was sent.

Interesting Idea Time?

While pondering this, I thought of something that would be cool: An SMS to IM gateway. Or maybe an email to IM gateway. Email to IM? (as long as it isn’t my SMTP server that went down…) Then my monitoring server could send a message, ideally via modem, that would pop up on the on-call guy’s computer. It wouldn’t wake him up, but it’d be there in the morning.

Anyone seen anything like that?

2 Responses to “WhatsUp Deferred Alerts”

1. Jack on June 14th, 2007 6:53 am
   

   Is that software really effective? I’d like to try it

2. Chris on June 14th, 2007 7:50 am
   

   I’ve generally been very pleased with it.

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