Re: Alert Rules

Think about your polling cycles.

• SolarWinds polls (pings) every 2 minutes.
• If a device fails a ping, Solarwinds sends out one ping every 5 seconds
• If a device fails 10 pings in a row, the device is THEN marked as down.
• Do you have a delay in your trigger? (You should) That's going to delay the actual alert message further.

Let's say that you put a 4 minute delay on your alert trigger. Meaning a device has to be down for 2 polling cycles before you call it officially "down" (this is a good idea, so you don't cut a ton of false alarms)

at 12:00 your device goes down

worse case, it's 12:02 before SolarWinds pings it for status. this ping fails

     SolarWinds sends out one ping every 5 seconds.

At 12:02:50 , the device is now marked as "down" in Solarwinds

     your alert trigger says to wait 2 minutes to make sure it's really down

at 12:04:50, you finally send out a message

if you have any delays in email processing, that could slow things down further.

So it's about 5 minutes.

Now you can cut down the time by doing the following things:

1. Reducing the polling cycle on the device - you can get down to one ping every 10 seconds I believe.
2. Reducing the delay for the alert trigger

If you did both of those things, you could get down to a 60 second delay between device down and your alert.

But my guess is that you would also generate so many false alarms that it would become useless noise.