Schedule notifications for sensor rather than pause sensor due to schedule

Dear Brian,

it is possible to use notifications with schedules, so that they would only be sent out during 'active' hours. We suggest to create a new notification for these devices/sensors that is paused by the schedule in the night, and then use the notification for the triggers on said devices/sensors.

Best Regards.

I now understand that this is now possible via this method. thank you. a comment however - if you move the schedule option from the individual notification definition page to the sensor notifications tab it would prevent me from having duplicate many different notifications just to adjust the schedule. for example, the way it is designed now if i have 5 different notifications (groups), with 5 different schedules each, i need to duplicate and create 25 different notifications. any change to one would need to be redone to all.

If the schedule is moved (or added) to the sensor notification definition page, i can define one notification and apply the schedule dynamically to the single notification when defined at the sensor. very similar to the frequency of those same notifications.

Dear Brian,

that might save time, yes, but on the other hand, for users who apply one notification to many sensors / devices, they would have to go to each objects trigger-page and change the schedule there if necessary, where as it would be one change in the "Notification"-Setup-Page with the way it is now. So this will most likely not be changed.

Best Regards.

Is this functionality in PRTG Network Monitor V7?

Thanks!

Notifications can be set on schedules also in PRTG 7, yes.

Since there are strong arguments for tying the schedule to the notification definition and to tying the schedule to the notification trigger (on the group, device or sensor level) would it be possible to do both? I think ideally there could be another column in the notification trigger which allows you to select a schedule to apply to this trigger. The drop down could have options for "none", "Use schedule defined in notification (default)" and a list of the defined schedules.

Then to help those who would need to visit many groups/devices/sensors to change a trigger schedule, make it searchable and multi-editable.

We have a global customer who has offices that are 24x7 monitored and offices that are only monitored during local business hours. Right now we need to create a local schedule and 4 different notifications (one per trigger) for each timezone on the planet. This is especially difficult since we highly customize the notification content (text and HTML). If we could tie notifications to triggers then we'd still need each of the unique timezone schedules but could reuse existing notifications instead of having to create 156 new ones.

In my opinion this would make the user interface unnecessarily complex for most users. Please consider working with schedules on the group/device/sensor level instead of the notifications, that's what we designed to software for.

This should be revisited. The user interface would not be any more complex in my opinion as the users that are asking for it are advanced users. If by default on every notification it was set to use the schedule as defined by the notification then for most people they will just ignore it.

I like others here have locations across the many different time zones and is just way to hard to create all the notification groups based on all the different time zones. It easily goes over one hundred very quickly.

While i like the simple idea of a schedule being tied to the Notification in reality it's more complex than that. You can't simply say "Please consider working with the way we designed it" Seeing as we are the actual users of it we ask you to please include the feature which will only make your already great product even stronger and more flexible.

Steven, thank you very much for your feedback. We actually have improvements for this, notifications during maintenances, and how to enable pauses on them, on the list. I cannot go into details right now, and have to ask you to please bear with us.

I really look forward to seeing something like this get put in place. Right now our customers will have maintenance whenever they see fit and give us a day or two warning. As it stands right now, all we can do is schedule a one time maintenance window and it pauses the data recording for those sensors or groups. It would be much more beneficial to just pause notifications during that time frame so we can still track the historical data.

Please push to get this in place sooner than later, do we have any idea on time frame this might be in place? Without giving too much away of course.

I'm sorry, in the moment, I cannot provide an ETA.

Hi, One more customer with same needs. When a sensor is down, we got the notification, ok. Then more notifications if the sensor stay down. Ok. After 5, 10 notifications for the same sensor, it's boring and useless.

The easy way to stop the notification is to pause the sensor, easy and fast, but then no more view on the state of the sensor = bad.

The hard way to stop : going to notification tab and ticking the special handling notification( something like this). This way the sensor is still monitored, but no notification = good.

Sadly, when the sensor is back good, we have to go again to the notification tab to tick back the general notification scheme. If missed, the sensor have no notification (very bad).

My point of view, as a user , a "pause notification" with timed duration (same as normal "pause") to be added to objects in PRTG.

I browsed the KB for this and I know pause notification the way we like is not supported now. It's a feature request.

Thanks.

Pierre

Pierre, the first action in such cases then should be to acknowledge the alarm on the sensor. This will prevent further notifications, but also keep the sensor active, in case scans are successful again.

I agree that this would be a great feature. We don't want to lose data during maintenance windows, we just don't want alerts. In fact, maintenance windows can be some of the most important times to get monitoring data. This could be for current status to make sure everything is working properly before tickets start getting generated or it could be for later to go back and see what happened when we did maintenance on X; what services were impacted?

We have worked around this with schedules on notifications, but it doesn't really support multiple situations. We have a global no notification between midnight and 4 a.m. server time, but we miss important things and we have to setup escalations for something that may have happened in this time period and not alerted on because of the notification schedule.

Please revisit to improve this for everyone.