Maintenance Mode in ECC?

[the_san_man]

Maybe it's there, maybe it's not, but I haven't found a way to temporarily suppress alerts during times like our monthly maintenance windows or when servers are being taken down repeatedly during the day for whatever reason.

For example, right now I have two servers that are being tested and the owner is rebooting the server multiple times during the day. so I get alerts relating to all of the agents going down and coming up. It would be way handy to have the ability to suppress just those two servers from the alerting. I'm still somewhat new to ECC, so forgive me in this feature is there.

[bodnarg]

This is not ideal, but you could modify the Schedules in one of two ways:

1) Edit all of the default schedules to skip the time you do not want to poll.
2) Create a new schedule excluding the maintenance windows and modify the policies you want to avoid getting false alerts from to use this schedule.

I'd go with option 2) personally just because I'm guessing there are only a few alerts that you are really concerned about supressing.

Hope this helps.

[RRR]

So there is no real maintenance window ? A simple click to suspend any DCP ?

[the_san_man]

Well, we do have a maintenance window, but it is not the same everytime. Depends on a number of factors. The only thing that is consistent, is that it will always be a Saturday. Most commonly, the third or fourth Saturday of the month. I'm more OK with putting up with the alerts for our "monthly maintenance" periods, as that is just one day per month I have to deal with them. I would really like to be able to suppress alerts for one or two servers whenever they are doing maintenance on them. Maybe an ad-hoc reboot from a software/patch install. But, by the suggestions so far, it is looking more like I need to submit a feature request. If you're familiar with MOM or NetIQ, that's the kind of feature I was hoping someone could direct me to!

[bodnarg · Accepted solution]

Any reason you can't just disable the agents on the host in maintenance mode that you want to supress the alerts? Most of the events are "point-in-time" not log scraping type of alerts so that should supress them.

An enhancement request to have a graceful and scheduled maintenance mode would be very nice...

[the_san_man]

I could do that for the "one offs". If I know about them in advance. I'm going to submit a feature request today.

Thanks for all of the suggestions.

[the_san_man]

By the way, I did submit a feature request for this. It would make my maintenance weekends so much nicer not having the contend with thousands of alerts/emails.

[RRR]

Speaking of enhancement requests:
we had an issue once that somebody by accident initialized the vcmdb instead of backing it up. We wrote an enhancement request for that as well, since we think that init commands should not be choosable from within ECC......

And now let's hope our questions are honored.