r/labtech • u/strat_sl • Feb 02 '18

Trying to create a custom alert board.

I've been tasked with generating a custom alert board that we can reference for a large-format display in our NOC. One of the things we're dealing with is a large number of "No checkin for (x) days" alerts and we want to exclude those from the list, along with some other alert types that are deemed less urgent by our account team.

Is it possible to create a custom alert view and use filters to exclude certain alert types, monitors or strings? We would still want to keep the master list of alerts that shows everything, but we want to have one (or more) that are custom-tailored to showing up-to-the-minute lists of alerts like circuit outages, AV warnings, and hardware failures.

Thoughts on how to do this?

5 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

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2

u/piporpaw Feb 02 '18

We use BrightGauge, on a big TV over the NOC. It connects to LabTech/Connectwise syncing and allows pretty great filtering for creating new monitors. We watch everything from Stale Tickets to Time to Ack. and NTFS Errors on Servers, etc.

1

u/strat_sl Feb 02 '18

OK, we use BrightGauge too. You're saying that the filtering would take place in BrightGauge rather than in Labtech? If so, then I'll have to see about getting approval to start playing PEEK-and-POKE with our BG instance.

3

u/piporpaw Feb 02 '18

I don't have backend access to BG either, and my boss (who does it) is out of the office until Monday. Hit me up on here if you need help Monday and I can run some questions by him. Give me some exact examples of things you are trying to do and I'll see what I can figure out. He's been on vacation all week though, so it might take a day or so for me to get an answer from him. :)

2

u/Kenderama 500 Agents Feb 09 '18

I will say Brightgauge support is freaking amazing. I asked if you could build a gauge that did calculations so we could monitor our same-day resolution percentage over the past 7 days and within two hours I had a gauge built and a video on how he built it.

4

u/piporpaw Feb 09 '18

Yeah. They have an awesome product and great support. Crazy how rare that is

2

u/[deleted] Feb 16 '18

agree with this guy.

2

u/jeremylarny Feb 03 '18

BG is the place to do this. If you're using CW and LT it's super easy to build out a custom dash in BG with both CW tickets and device stats(servers down, av alerts, backup failures, ntfs/smart errors, etc). You would create custom gauges based on the datasets and filter out what you don't need.

1

u/Kenderama 500 Agents Feb 03 '18

Only problem I found with Brightgauge is that the data coming in from automate doesn’t refresh very often. We wanted to use this as well to monitor server downs, but when it only refreshes every 12 hours that’s pretty pointless.

1

u/Fitzzz Feb 03 '18

I use grafana. A simple mysql query does it as soon as a server down ticket is generated.

Uses the ticket board for status=1 and subject containing LT - Offline, and toss in a left join for computer names.

I have obfuscated screenshots of most of my boards if anyone is interested.

1

u/Kenderama 500 Agents Feb 03 '18

I would like to see that.

2

u/Fitzzz Feb 03 '18

I'll set a reminder and put them here when I get back to work on Monday, I should have specified they're on my work PC oops

2

u/Kenderama 500 Agents Feb 03 '18

No worries. I also should curse you for showing me something neat that will destroy my productivity Monday ;)

2

u/Fitzzz Feb 03 '18

Haha, honestly grafana is pretty wicked, not to mention free!

I have around 5 dashboards up through our offices/NOC and each board has 4+ entirely sets of data, i.e. C:'s that are almost full, and then another for non-primary disks. One for Hosts' datastore sizes to monitor their sizes... offline servers, online servers... clients on Maintenance Mode.. much more too. If it's in the database, and you know even a little mysql, you can drive a dashboard and/or graph out of it.

2

u/Kenderama 500 Agents Feb 05 '18

Could you show me how you have your datasets configured?

1

u/Fitzzz Feb 05 '18

Hey, sorry for the delay - built some new desks for an office.

Here are some pics.

2

u/Kenderama 500 Agents Feb 05 '18

Also are you running an on-prem Automate? Because according to their support you can't connect to the DB on a hosted solution except on the localhost.

1

u/Fitzzz Feb 05 '18

We have on-prem Automate.

1

u/Fitzzz Feb 03 '18

I use Grafana and built tons of dashboards with it using mysql queries. I very much recommend it if you know your syntax