Expert
AdvisorI've taken a similar approach to this with a few things where I've wanted to put some meaningful text into the alert itself. Rather than using the instance description, I tend to put the extra information into instance properties though
For example, I have a data source that checks if WMI is working properly on Windows Servers. If it can connect over WMI it runs a few checks to ensure that we have the necessary permissions (checks it can receive OS information, checks it can query services state, etc).
This runs in Active Discovery, rather than data collection, just so I can write text info out to instance properties. So, if all is good, then it writes the instance property wmicheck.statusCode=0. If not, then it writes wmicheck.statusCode=1 and wmicheck.statusCodeReason=<what the script found was the problem>. The Active Discovery runs every 24 hours.
Then I have the collection script just read the value of the "statusCode" instance prop and alerts if it is 1, but I can include ##auto.wmicheck.statusCode## in the alert message to get the details of where the problem is.
NeophyteHi Dave,
The problem I have with that is that active discovery only runs in 3 intervals (15mins, 1 hour, 1 day), And I don't want to risk the instance property having outdated information.
It would be so much more useful if we could just write to a property directly from a data collection, without going the round-about way of using the API. Or even better just be able to pass the text as a token to the alert message.
AdvisorI failed to mention, we also populate an auto.wmicheck.lastChecked instance that records when it last ran. It doesn't make the AD collection intervals any more flexible, but at least gives a user an idea how out of date the information is.
Agreed, it would be great if we could somehow pass some custom text with an alert value.
