Alerts window pane

Posted by: Anonymous

Alerts window pane - 05/10/04 08:44 AM

I would love to see an alerts pane, just above the "Route Changes" pane and below the "address to trace" pane which would show alerts that have occurred. That would make it easier to see what had happened over night or over the weekend. It would be good to be able to click on the alert time/date in the "Alerts Occurred" window and to be taken to the graph at the right point in time to see the tracert results.

I have to do a report each monday on net outages over the weekend and this would make it SOOO much quicker than going through the alert emails one by one.

Ta
Posted by: Pete Ness

Re: Alerts window pane - 05/11/04 02:41 PM

Although the alert history isn't currently logged anywhere, you can set up the alerts to log their history of starting / stopping to a file, which sounds like it would do what you need.

The key to this is the "Launch an executable" event, which allows you to run any program or command. If you set up 2 of these events on each alert you want history about, then you can get history for that alert when it starts and stops. One of these events will Notify "when alert conditions start" and the other will be "when alert conditions end".

Now, the last part is how to write to a file. There are a lot of executables you can run here: batch files, other programs, etc. For a really, really easy method of doing it, just use the built-in Windows cmd.exe and Echo commands (note that if you're using Windows 9x, you'll probably need to replace cmd.exe with command.com in these examples).

The following command will log a message to the c:\alerthistory.txt file. There are tons and tons of ways you can modify this command to make it more useful.

cmd.exe /c echo $date $hour:$minute $Dest Alert Started >> c:\alerthistory.txt

This has a downside of popping up a DOS window each time a messages needs to be logged. An easy way of having that not happen is to set up your own Windows shortcut with the proper settings in it - either pointing at cmd.exe, or some other batch file or logging application of your choice.

If you have any issues with getting this working, please reply back here or send a message to support@pingplotter.com with a description of what's not working. I just set up a test instance of PingPlotter that uses this exact setup to log starting / ending of alerts.