Best practices and tips for alerting in the SolarWinds Platform

Use these best practices and tips to help you configure and test your alerts.

Use the out-of-the-box alerts as templates

SolarWinds recommends using the alerts that are included when you install the product as templates for your new alerts.

Find an alert that is similar to one you want to create and then click Duplicate & Edit in the menu bar. Fields are pre-populated so you can skip to specific parts of the Alert Wizard where there is data you want to change.

Enable out-of-the-box alerts

If there are out-of-the-box alerts that match your monitoring needs, enable them in your environment. You can customize the alert actions for those alerts. If you want to modify the conditions, use the alert as a template.

Restrict who receives alerts

During your initial evaluation and testing, send alerts to a few people instead of to a large distribution list. This can prevent overloading your email server while you fine-tune your alerts.

Plan which devices to monitor

To reduce the number of alerts sent out, consider which devices are most important. For example, you may want to receive alerts only for mission-critical interfaces instead of every interface on a device.

Establish dependencies

Establish dependencies to prevent you from receiving duplicate alerts that stem from a single network event. For example, you may want to be emailed if servers in your server farm go down, but if the router goes down and the servers can no longer be polled, you do not want to receive notifications for all of your servers.