About Action strategies

When configuring actions for your devices and monitors, there are a few things you should take into consideration.

• Large lists of devices have the potential of sending out very large amounts of external notifications (email, SMS, beeper, etc).

  Imagine the number of messages sent if external notifications are placed on a router and every device and monitor that uses that router for their connection to the Internet. If the router goes down, it will appear as if all of the devices are down, and messages will be sent for each of them. Consider using dependencies and limiting the external notifications to the router and the most important of the devices in the group.

• Do not rely on sound actions when there is not someone around to hear the notification.

  Sound notifications are safe to use in almost any situation, but is not the best choice for items that need to be monitored overnight.

• If the device states do not fit what you need, change them, or add new ones.

  You may want to add device states for longer periods of downtime. Perhaps creating a Down at least 60 mins state, and sending an escalated message to show that the device is still down after an hour.

• Action policies Action Policies are easier to manage than lists of actions built on a device.

  Whenever possible, it is a good idea to use action policies over actions configured for a single device. That way, you can reuse the work you put into the list, and can keep better watch over the actions that are being fired.

• Visual notifications are usually enough for most of the devices on your network.

  Unless the device is vital to the operations of the business or office, the state change color and shape should be enough to let you know what is going on with your monitored devices.

• An Action can be assigned to a device or to a specific monitor. If you want to be notified if any or all of the monitors on a device goes down, assign the action to the device. If you are concerned with specific monitors on a device, assign the action to the monitor itself. Remember that if you assign the action to both the monitor and the device, both actions will fire if the monitor goes down.