Forum Discussion

Tom_Lasswell's avatar
8 years ago

datapoint categories/classification

I'd like to suggest the possibility of adding a "category" to the datapoints. This would assist in alerting and metrics around what types of alerts are occuring. Adding a field to the datapoint would allow us to categorize the type of datapoint for automatic correlation of the events in other systems and as well as provide additional logic for dashboards where you can show alerts based on category type.

My idea of default categories would be (not exhaustive, I'd like to see these customizable in the admin area for these to make since for everyone's organization):

  • Capacity
  • Configuration
  • Other
  • Outage/Uptime
  • Performance

I've been toying with the idea of adding these just to the alert message template for every alert we have configured and just stripping it out in my automation, but I'm sure there are others that would love to see this as well to help classify the types of alerts that are generated.

  • Another reason to have alert categories would be to solve the ping loss and idle interval dual alerts.  At the moment these would create two incidents in ServiceNow if I were to use the new ServiceNow integration app that was recently announced.  If the alert rule could make use of alert categories, then one incident could be created for any alerts of a category.

  • Agree!  We've been doing a lot of work to standardize our DataPoint names as a workaround to not having a category attribute.  For example, we would like to categorize all "database" data points, regardless of data source, as database data points.  Same for file system data points, regardless of platform OS.  We use different middleware solutions, some COTS, some in house, and we'd like to categorize all middleware alerts as such.

    It would then be awesome to be able to create alerts rules based on the categorization, i.e. all "file system" alerts go to the File System and Storage team, all "database" alerts go to the databases team.

    This Category attribute of alerts should also be available as a column in the Alert Widget table.