Scenario:
We have a SAM template written that has components that execute vbscript to check the modified time of a single folder (I folder per component in the template). Normally this would be "simple" as I'd just assign the SAM template to the server holding the files...but...These folders are on NAS filers that have DFS set up. As a result, the file paths are presented as the DFS link \\xyz\abcdefg\folder_to_monitor, where "xyz" is not device with an IP. If you poke around the share is hosted by several servers (one is active, the other is not).
So:
- I can't just add the SAM template to a single node as the share can "move around/failover". There may be some IP that hosts the "cluster", but I haven't found it.
- If I add it to all of the nodes hosting the share, they would all alert at the same time if the alerting conditions are met (and I would be double monitoring the share). I really don't want to put some special logic in the vbscript to ignore the share existing on the nodes where it is not hosted. If the folder is not accessible, then that is considered a problem as I can't determine the folder modtime and "not existing" is a problem if they're both not existing . I could leave one "always red" and the other "always green" and when they flip flop we just deal with it...but, well, I really hate that. I really, really do.
- I added the monitoring to one of my app servers (just to put it somewhere), but we have some rules that say "alert me if anything occurs on the server", so I get alerts for another teams monitoring in this template. I could mess with my alerting rules and add exceptions or something BUT I'd rather keep the rules simple and find out how to "isolate" application monitoring like this vs. piggybacking it on someone's server then using alerting rules to puzzle it all out. I may have more of these in the future as well so I'd like a better "hack", if you will.
In the end:
I've decided to create an external node called "localhost" because it resolves to an IP (so I can add the external node). Then I can change the Caption of the node to "appX". Now I can attach any "rogue" SAM templates for the app to this external node. If I have more apps in the future I can set up another "localhost" external node so the templates can be isolated...if I wanted to do that. I probably won't for now, I'll just hook them all up the single "localhost" node and try to get reporting, views, groups, and alerts for that app to not use on the host.
Questions:
- Does anyone know of a better (or another, even if convoluted but you like it) way to handle this?
- Will adding several "localhost" external nodes or just a bunch of external nodes with the same IP cause any sort of odd issues in the system? I like the idea of using localhost because it's an obvious IP address I can filter out easily with scripts, and reports (or my brain). External nodes seem like a placeholder only, but it seems odd they require me to have an IP address if they're not needed.