If you’ve used ELM for any length of time you probably already know that you can quickly create a new Event View by right-clicking on any event and selecting Create Event View… on the context menu. This is a handy shortcut for speeding up Event View creation where ELM automatically builds the necessary filters for you based on the event you started from.
In this tech tip article we’ll take a look at another handy shortcut for creating a custom Event View that we want to add a notification to, only this time we’re going to do it from a Monitor Item.
Before we start let’s take a look at one of the preconfigured Event Views in ELM called the “ELM — Monitor Item Events” Event View. This shows you all the events generated specifically from Monitor Items, things such as:
- Ping Failure
- Performance Alarms
- Event Alarms, and so on
That’s great, but most likely you don’t want to assign a Notification Method to this view as you are potentially going to get bombarded with notifications that you don’t necessarily want. Ideally, you would assign a notification to a single situation, such as a Ping failure.
To create an Event View for a Ping failure you could comb through this Event View, find the event for the failure, and create an Event View from it with the shortcut mentioned above. That could be time consuming depending on how many events are in the view, plus the Event Filter that would automatically be created would be specific to that machine where the event (ping failure) occurred. Therefore the Event Filter would also require some modifications if you wanted it to be for any system, not just the one you started from. If we want the Event View and corresponding notification to work for any ping failure then we’ll want to approach this differently to save ourselves some time.
To start with we’ll navigate to Monitoring > All Monitors in the left pane of the console and click on it. Next we’ll choose the Ping Monitor, right-click, and choose All Tasks > Create Event View…
This will launch the Create New Event View Wizard and walk through the steps and Event View settings as usual. When you get to the Include Filters dialog you’ll notice that ELM has created a Ping Monitor Event Filter, and looking at the properties of that Filter we can see that the specific Event IDs have been entered for us in the filter criteria along with the Event Source. There are no computer names specified so the filter is more wide open than if we would have started this from a single event.
Moving further with the dialog we can select a Notification Method to assign to this new Ping Failure Event View (assuming we have notification methods already created). In this case we’ll choose our Mail notification.
ELM automatically gives the new Event View a name, based on the Monitor Item we started from, but we can change it here if desired and add a description.
Once the wizard is complete, the new Ping Monitor Event View will show up in the left pane of the console under Results > Event Views. Typically any newly created Event View will show up at the bottom of the list until the main Event Views container is manually refreshed, then it will fall in to alpha sort. Note that our new Ping Monitor Event View also has the Notification Assigned associated with a green icon indicating that a Notification Method is assigned to this Event View.
If we expand the new Event View we can explore and see the new Ping Monitor Event Filter and SMTP Notification Method which have been assigned.
Now any time a ping failure event occurs, the Ping Monitor Event View will trigger a notification letting us know which system(s) the failure occurred on. We’ve quickly built a granular Event View and assigned a Notification Method to it – all directly off a Monitor Item!
We hope that you found this article on Creating Quick Custom Event Views for Notifications informative and useful and wish you continued success with ELM.