SolarWinds alerts are meaningful and useful when configured to meet your needs; however, our clients often mention they aren’t being made aware of critical events or they are getting flooded with alerts. We help our clients reconfigure and optimize those alerts using the Veloway Process, which we developed to help us optimize your SolarWinds Orion server and standardize and verify every alert.
We perform the following steps during the Veloway Process:
- Define Alert Requirements
- Define Alert Standards
- Inventory Existing Alerts
- Audit Existing Alerts
- Build an Alert Registry
Define Requirements
First we identify the major components of your IT infrastructure, and then prioritize the components and protocols critical to operations.
Defining Alert Standards
We define alert standards, which create a set of best practice rules for alerting. Examples:
- Alert email notifications will only go to email groups and not individuals
- All alerts will have a common naming convention to make alerts more easily recognizable by type and purpose
- Every alert must be reviewed and approved by a defined set of individuals/groups before entering service
Inventory Existing Alerts
We inventory all existing alerts to understand what their intention is, what will trigger the alert, and what the intended actions will be.
Audit Existing Alerts
Once we understand existing alerts, if any, we compare them to the defined requirements and alerting standards. Alerts not meeting these defined criteria are removed or modified, and alerts in line with the requirements are maintained.
Building An Alert Registry
We document your organization’s alerts and related thresholds into an Alert Registry document so that team members can view SolarWinds alerts and understand what triggers them even when not working in SolarWinds.
