Disable notifications without pausing a sensor

You can use schedules on notifications.

For this you can create a schedule according to your needs and then go to the notification and select this schedule to pause the notification accordingly.

Can you expand upon this a bit? I believe what the OP is trying to do is simply pause notifications for a given sensor or device without pausing the sensor or device. Unless I'm missing something, schedules for notifications disable ALL notifications for all sensors during a period of time.

For example, my server room A/C is acting up right now and causing a few sensors to near continuously go from error to OK state and back. I don't want hundreds of notifications, but I do want PRTG to keep tracking the status of those sensors.

Thanks, James

Yes, you are right, a schedule pauses a notification wherever it is used.

But the monitoring still goes on.

So you have to setup your notifications as granular as you need it.

So if you do not want to be notified e.g. from special devices - then either group them accordingly and use no notification on this group - or set the device notification setting in the way that it uses only triggers especially defined for the device instead of inheritance

And if you want to be notified only on certain times, setup a new notification and use it especially on this group or device and pause it accordingly.

I don't see an answer to the reply of James, I would like to ask the same question:

For example: We have server A with notification but today the has a high CPU load which we are working on, it it possible to temporarily disable the notifications?

So I don't want to change the notification or change the scheduled pauze of the notification because that will effect the notification on all the other devices and sensors.

Is there a way to temporarily disable the notifications for a sensor or device but not pauze it.

Yes, you can pause a notification directly under Setup ->My Account -> Notifications There is a "pause" button for each notification. when the work is done, you can resume the respective notification. Beforehand you should check "used by" to be sure that you pause the correct notification.

Dear Walter, I'm aware of pausing a notification but that will pause ALL the sensors and devices the notification is linked to.

I want to temporarily disable the notifications for a sensor or device but I don't think this is possible..

Dear Trans-iX

Please use the Clone feature of notifications and use that cloned notification for the sensor in question.

Otherwise, it is not possible to disable notifications for a sensor while still collecting data from that sensor.

I encounter the same types of situations. Wanting to temporarily stop notifications without pausing monitoring.

What would be nice is if you could acknowledge a sensor for a scheduled amount of time and during that time monitoring would be continued but notifications would not be sent (regardless of how many times up/down status was changed).

We have currently no plans to implement a second kind of pause.

If a particular notification should not be triggered, it can be paused. But only the entire notification, not just for a particular sensor.

If (by a regular maintenance phase) sensors will alert on a particular time, a notification schedule can be used to pause a notification for that time.

In general, we try to offer general solutions (for example schedules, which can be used to pause sensors, or pause notifications) instead of special features (like the manual pause of a notification only for a particular sensor.)

Please add such a feature because it is essential for monitoring during maintenance work on a remote office. Monitoring should go on but no notifications during maintenance.

Dear Andreas Ender

Please use schedules for the notifications in question. This way the monitoring continues, while notifications can be either discarded or postponed, depending on the schedule setting.

I registered just to add to this message. This afternoon there was a power outage. I have about 8 different devices that are down, and I'm getting summarized notifications for all of them. I would like to pause them as the power company says power will be on no more than 3 hours from now.

It seems complex to create a notification schedule for this pausing, which I will then have to revert back to the normal one each of these 8 devices once the power is back up.

Why is there no quick way to temporarily pause only the notifications while continuing to monitor the sensors? I want to be able to either: 1)Pause notifications for a certain period of time (like the sensors) 2)Pause notifications until the sensor comes back online, then get notified the sensor is back up.

There's obviously some demand for this (starting 2 years ago). Maybe someone can look a little more into this now? Thanks, Kevin

Dear Kelmore

Notifications themselves can be manually paused via Setup | Account Settings | Notifications.

There are two things to consider:

• You need to manually resume those notification as there is no "Pause for ..." option.
• The notification is paused for all sensors which use it.

I'd like to add my vote for the ability to easily pause notifications for chosen sensors, in similar fashion to the current ability to right-click and Pause sensors.

Dear ocucolimited

We are discussing now an option to pause notifications on a sensor-base. No decision has been made yet, but we will evaluate this feature.

This is the very feature that I'm searching for. We are a college campus environment and in the summer months a lot of work gets done to our residence halls. Well creating a schedule doesn't really work as we might get a notice that 2 weeks from now there will be work from 8am to 5pm that might cause networking devices to reboot. I can setup a re-occurring schedule but this is more of a one time event in the future. On the flip-side we also we get calls that is a power problem or contractor work to be done and we need to shut down alarms for the next 3 hours for a building. But we still want to monitor what happened during that period of time. This is where we need the ability to say pause alarms but not stop gathering of SNMP information. We simply don't want our network admins to get flooded with alarms, but we still have data retention of the event. Pausing by accounts as that one account may be on many networking switches that are being monitored and you simply don't want all those notices shut off to the techs.

Dear gilmorrr

This feature is on our radar, but so far we did not implement it. We are still discussing the best user interface approach for this, because we want to avoid interface clutter.

Please don't expect an implementation any time soon.

It is already possible to manually pause a notification. So far we don't offer a "pause until", though.

Another vote for this feature please ! If I'm working late at night & there is a server outage, I might have 30 or more sensors on it, I dont want to be disabling notifications or setting up schedules, I'd like to continue gathering data but dont notify me until tomorrow morning when I get into the office. Thank you.

We are having similar issues with notifications that will be in error for extended maintenance or repair windows. I think the bigger issue is understanding the thought behind pausing a sensor versus pausing a notification. We see the value in pausing a sensor AND pausing notifications. Why is pausing a sensor from capturing data have a higher president over pausing the notification for that sensor? What is the use case for not capturing data, as we do not see a value in easily pausing the sensor from capturing live data? How do other users of PRTG use this feature in a day to day operation? when working on a device that is in error, Engineers will need to focus on fixing the issue and not being constantly notified that there is an issue. Part of resolving an issue is having your monitoring system capture data to review e.g. memory on a server or bandwidth utilization on a port. More over if an entire site is impacted by an outage, one would want to pause notifications for that site but still capture all the sensor data for all the devices at that site. How would we best use PRTG to achieve our goal of adhoc pausing notifications while leaving still capturing sensor data for those devices? I would suggest changing the meaning of Pause from Pause sensor data to Pause sensor notification and make "Pause Data Capture" a feature in the overview or other location.

Dear jschiller

Thank you for your voice in this matter. We see an increasing demand for this kind of feature. However, we have other features on our shorter list, which we give a higher priority.

This list contains some all-new features as well as UI polish. There is no telling if a notification trigger pause feature will ever be implemented. We develop PRTG as standard software and assume a standard monitoring scenario which we try to cover with a minimum amount of options. This keeps the PRTG interface clean.

That being said, we listen to user feedback. This does not mean to implement every suggestion, but it means that we read through any suggestion we find, and that we have regular meetings in which we talk about the user feedback.

Another vote for this one. However schedule notification does not stop the sensor from alerting. it will be nice to have a soft pause/suppression feature similar to pause, but still allow the sensor to continue to poll. this is specially useful for backup period or collecting monitoring data and not alerting outside of business hours.

Another vote for this. We sometimes have sensors which are flapping and generating out of hours alerts, waking people up. We need to continue monitoring so can't pause. Acknowledging the alert doesn't work when it's flapping. Removing the sensor permanently from notification is risky - easy to forget to re-enable it. A sensor level "suppress alerts" button for x period would be ideal.

push - still waiting for that feature...

We see this is an ongoing topic, so I want to take some time to explain our reasoning why it is still not on our agenda.

Currently, we work on other features, so there will be no solution in the short term. Going forward, we don't want to introduce new interface options unless we see really wide-spread usage. We rather would try to solve it another way. There is nothing to announce yet, but we plan to provide other means to handle maintenance windows.

This feature is also on our wishlist, have you any idea if and when this will be implemented?

I've started work at an environment where PRTG has been deployed. As a network ops person, the ability to suppress notifications while continue to monitor a sensro is a critical feature that is missing from PRTG, which severely inhibits PRTG's usefulness for 24x7 operations. Suppressing an entire sensor is just not an acceptable option for dealing with planned maintenance windows as all data is lost. Please look at prioritising this!

Dear Mike

You already can pause the actual notification. You can also use a schedule to have the notifications during the pause not discarded and just postponed.

To reduce the flood of notifications, you can enable the summarization feature and use longer times, like 5 or 30 minutes to summarize. Depending on the configuration, the first down notification is sent immediately, the next are summarized but if the pool contains 25 notifications, those are sent as well to let you know that there is something to look into.

We are aware that this is more a workaround than a full solution. We are still hesitant to implement a notification-only pause because this feature implies a lot of internal changes. Users would also like to have an additional sensor status for this. This is something we will likely not do in the foreseeable future, as an additional status has even deeper implications.

Much as I love PRTG our install has grown to 4000 sensors now and I've struggled to tame the volume of alerts it generates. We've ended up filtering the notifications through OpsGenie, a service which allows much more control and filtering of alerts as well as management of on-call schedules, delivery to primary and fail-over recipients etc.

For example yesterday we had external routing issues causing a monitored website to be going up and down every couple of minutes generating hundreds of alerts. In PRTG I can either pause monitoring for x hours or perpetually disable notifications and hope I remember to re-enable them, neither are ideal. With OpsGenie I could put a temporary exclusion rule on these alerts until 9am the next morning allowing me to sleep without my phone beeping all night.

For others looking for more control of the notifications, OpsGenie compliments PRTG well. (I've no affiliation, just a satisfied customer).

Tim

There are options like using notification summarization to avoid notification bombardment.

We don't want to add more pause / maintenance options in PRTG itself, but we agree that managing notifications automatically would be useful. This is more complex that it might look, so there is nothing to announce.

For now, using a third-party notification filter might be the best solution.

Pushing up this request again... This should be a basic feature of ANY monitoring tool.

Disable the whole notification just because one device / sensor is on maintenance is not enterprise like. Pause the Device / Sensor just to avoid notifications is also not really a solution btw.

Any hope Paessler will implement this widely requested feature in the next months?

Dear MarcelE,

I am sorry, no.

There are many reasons. The notification-only pause would add complexity to the interface. Normally, when a device is monitored, the user also wants to get its notifications. During maintenance, the device or sensor can be paused.

If the notifications are inherited, those inheritance can be manually taken away (and later re-enabled.)

Most cases are covered already in one war or another. Yes, there are some occasions where no easy solution is provided, but we don't want to add more complexity at this time.

I just want to add that this feature would be really helpful. Sometimes I just want to monitor a network device but not alert on it. I understand how to suppress the notification, it just makes trouble shooting the correct problem when looking at all the alerts when a device with many sensors go down. Also sometimes we just want to collect data and don't want an alert or notification.

Just to reiterate all the other posters - suppressing notifications is a requirement for our NOC as well. It seems that most competitors offer this as standard.

Currently it means that we have two monitoring platforms - one for IT Ops, one for Network Ops - not ideal.

The workaround is just that - not something to rely on.

We see the amount of feedback, but we don't want to add more interface and object status complexity. This would also complicate sensor status logging.

Hi!

Another vote for sensor notification pause. I don't see how this adds to interface and object status complexity? This feature is a must and I don't know how ti stress this enough.

We have notifications set up for whole groups of devices and we can't afford to pause notifications for that whole group. As many before me have explained - disabling notification inheritance for that particular deivce/sensor might be dangerous, because you easily forget to revert it back. This would work if you could only set up that the customized notifications work only for a certain time period and then automatically revert back to inherited settings.

This isn't a feature request that changes the core of PRTG, but it would really help a lot of your customers using PRTG more efficiently. Offering workarounds isn't a good idea.

Summarized notifications are still notifications. Ff the alarm was already acknowledged and a maintenance windows was scheduled in the near future, you should be able to pause notifications but still monitor the device/sensor. I don't see why you are so against implementing this basic feature.

Just discussed this capability with one of our lead developers and I told him this has to be possible in PRTG and I just haven't seen it yet. I decided to do a little research and stumbled across this KB article. Please add my vote to the list and reconsider the priority for this feature request. Our PRTG implementation is still fairly small but as we grow this feature gap will become more of an issue for us. I see from previous comments the case for adding this feature appears to be very strong so hopefully we will see progress on this item in the near future. PRTG is a great solution but this improvement would be a wonderful addition. Pretty please?

I stumbled on this page while asking the same question as everyone else here. Just read through 5 years of the same back and forth. PRTG, all we are really asking here is that if we acknowledge an alarm for a set period of time, that the sensor remain in an acknowledged state for the specified period of time, rather than flipping back to OK/green as soon as the issue is resolved. My request is not maintenance related, but rather related to sensors bouncing due to an issue. The period that a sensor is bouncing is one of the more important times you want to be collecting data, yet it is also a time when you don't want to receive an alert with every bounce. Please consider this.

Dear jzamanski,

our stance is to not announce any new feature until it is available in the preview branch. Here is why:

We notice the demand for a notification-trigger pause and of course consider it for when we improve the notifications. But with that said, we possibly just created an expectation that such feature would be coming soon.

That will not be the case. It is not even definitive which feature we implement for new notifications, nor when we start the implementation. This might sound disappointing, but we are working on other features at this time which are at least as important. Instead of creating a possibly false expectation, we present PRTG as it is right now.

There are many forum requests and use cases for this basic use case (quirky to model in PRTG because that boils down on how the architecture of PRTG decided to couple notifications and state machines and event handling):

"I want 100% monitoring for many reasons but I don't want to receive notifications during a maintenance window (MW), but still I want to receive any DOWN events after the MW in case such DOWN event happened in the MW BUT is not cleared after the MW."

This basic monitoring feature is one of the top requested, it is such common use case, but it still difficult to express easily, consistently, directly, without too many moving parts and not robust workarounds, in PRTG.

Trying to figure out how to do this for an upcoming maintenance window, came across this thread.

The use case is simple, we have piles of equipment that we know will be up and down and do not want a flood of pointless alerts during the window. We do however need to be able to look at the current state of everything from time to time to ensure the things we think are working really are.

Abusing the schedule to accomplish this is entirely dumb. Since there seems to be much consternation about how to implement this, let me suggest something: A pause sensor button and a pause notification button. That's it, simple to represent with hieroglyphs, simple to understand. Done and done.

An elegant user interface that is missing a core feature is a useless interface. This thread has been opened for 6 years now, this is a mainline function, seriously get it done please.

Dear GiantJunkBox,

maintenance mode in PRTG is implemented as pausing the monitoring because the data received would not be reliable and there could be downtime which would be added to the device's downtime statistic.

Pausing individual triggers would complicate the interface as a sensor would then have two statuses at the same time. We agree that the current interface has some limitations for larger setups, but we don't think adding options and statuses is the right solution. We think that with future changes to PRTG we can improve the overall user experience on large setups.

I feel that Paessler is truly not understanding the business need here.

We have a need to temporarily pausing alerting for a period of maintenance, but STILL COLLECT data. This is needed so that instead of having no data for a 4 hour maintenance window (where notifications should be off), we simply lose the 10 minutes of data during the reboot, and not 4 hours of data.

I've worked now at a handful of companies, that used PRTG, and every one of them wants the same thing - for the person doing the maintenance window, to be able to pause notifications for the window period, but leave monitoring up. This way, staff not working on it don't get alerted, but staff who ARE can use the dashboard, and confirm when system X or Y is back up, to proceed with things. Or have data on how long the reboot took. Or observe if the CPU spiked for 10 minutes upon return to service.

To have to do this by way of modifying the Notification Schedules (which may or may not be available to the on call person doing maintenance), is not acceptable.

This is similar to saying that there is no option to Snooze an Outlook reminder for a meeting, your only option is to temporarily remove the meeting from your calendar. That's insane. "Snooze alert" is pretty basic, and is in many many products.

This really needs to get bumped up the priority list, given how many posts and requests I've been finding asking for this, it doesn't seem the company I work for is alone in this.

Dear Paessler

I'm also one of those users, who would like to stop only the notification of selected sensors.

This often happens if we can't instantly resolve an issue but would like to continue to see the sensor in warning or error state. Pausing the sensors leaves us in withoud visibility of the actual state of the devices been monitored.

Pausing the whole notification is not a reasonable solution, without creating several different notificatons templates (which makes our setup much more complex).

Please add this as a feature.

Thanks & best regards bixio

Dear Avram, dear bixio,

in order to officially create a feature request, please use this method allowing users directly to vote.

+1 for Mute/Pause Notifications based on sensors/devices and not globally My Scenario - I'm responsible to patch systems - Today o "pause" the system, so i can stop services, install updates, restart the server without getting alerts and ticket." - and after i'm done, i resume the device/Sensor.

Problem: i have no idea, if the configured probes are "happy" after my work, So having a status while the deice is still in maintenance would be great. It is also a confirmation, that everything is running fine again. And it might help me to find issues during updates (like running out of disk space).

No one is watching the individual results in "normal mode". we all wait for notifications. During maintenance, no one wait for notifications, i use PRTG then as Dashboard to see, how far the updates are done.

So please rename the "Pause"-Menu into "Pause Monitoring" And add a Menu "Pause notification" to stop notifications for that sensor or device for a given time.

"Pause Notification" is even more important for me than "Pause Monitoring" because i do not want to stop collecting data. I simply want to mute notifications for sensors and devices, where i'm working on

Frank

Hi there,

As mentioned in our previous post, this is not planned at the moment. Feel free to open an official feature request, so other users can also vote for this.

How we handle those and how you can open a feature request is explained here.

Kind regards,
Birk Guttmann, Tech Support Team

If everyone can please upvote the following 2 feature request so that we can get this feature ASAP! https://kb.paessler.com/en/topic/87849-open-pause-notifications-not-monitoring-during-maintenance https://kb.paessler.com/en/topic/87210-add-ability-to-pause-notifications-without-pausing-a-sensor

It's 2022, is this feature available now ?

Hello Catapult,

our focus is on other features. With status handling in PRTG, we have ideas for a more flexible approach but other things like a new API, a new interface and more have priority.