[funky music]
>>THWACKcamp!
>>Welcome to this session on Custom Properties,
I'm SolarWinds Head Geek Chrystal Taylor,
And this is gonna be a jam-packed session.
So let's get started.
This is intended to be a primer
on the Orion Custom Properties.
Maybe if you're a new user,
it's gonna help you, teach you how to use them
and what they are.
And if you're an experienced Orion user
the intention is for me to get the creative juices flowing,
maybe there's places that you haven't used them
or you hadn't thought that you could use them.
And we're gonna get that,
get that going to improve your use of Custom Properties.
So let's get started on how to create them.
First, we're gonna go to our settings page.
And we're gonna go to all settings.
And then we're gonna check out
the Manage Custom Properties area.
And in here, you can see
that you can have Custom Properties
for all types of values in your,
in your Orion database.
Most people generally use them on their nodes.
But you can also use them on interfaces, volumes,
applications,
your storage devices,
your virtual devices,
your databases, pretty much everywhere,
you can use Custom Properties,
and they're useful for a number of things.
I think that a lot
of people end up using them in more
of like a flat data format,
but you can definitely use them for more
and including something we've showcased before
in SolarWinds Lab and a couple of other places,
which is alert email.
Now here at manage Custom Properties,
you can easily see all of the Custom Properties
that already exist.
And some of those are out-of-the-box Custom Properties.
And if you've created any in your environment,
or anybody has created any in your environment,
they'll show up here.
And you can filter them based on object
and you can filter them based on a couple
of different properties,
depending on how you wanna look at them.
So we're gonna create a new Custom Property.
Here you can see all the different information.
So for the property that we've selected,
the entity we've selected, we selected nodes,
you can see on your left-hand side,
all of the properties that already exist.
Now some of these came out of the box,
and some of them are ones that we've created.
We're gonna set up our property name
and then the property description.
And property descriptions are super useful if you need
to say who created it,
or if you wanna say what you're using it for,
or anything like that,
which will be useful for another admin coming
in after you.
Or it would be useful for yourself if you forgot
what you used this for originally,
and maybe you wanna change that.
This is all editable,
you can change it later if you need to.
You can also see there's a data format here,
we're gonna get into that in a second
of different types of data formats that you can use.
You can also require them to be filled out
that they're mandatory.
And I definitely recommend this in most cases
that you're gonna be using them in alerts
or reports or anywhere important in your platform,
you wanna make sure that you're not gonna
have any unknown values in there.
And you're not gonna have any just blank values
because you want to make sure
it's gonna get pulled in for that logic.
So the other thing you can do
is you can create a drop-down list of values.
And in that drop-down list,
you can specify exactly what they are.
Now, these are super useful.
It prevents typos,
it prevents people from adding in, you know,
crazy things in there that that don't need to be in there.
So if you create a Custom Property that's intended
to apply to which team each node is,
is assigned to.
So, you know, say you have your server team,
you have an application team,
you have a database team maybe
and all of their nodes are being monitored by Orion,
and you want to have that noded in Orion as well,
then you can use a Custom Property to do that.
And having those mandatory fields
and having that be filled out already
prevents people from adding things in there
that you don't want
and then just makes them choose
from a pre-selected list which an administrator can add to,
or you can come in here and modify that list
of pre-selected values as well as needed.
And then additionally, you can see here
where you can select it to be used.
Now it's selected by default
all of these different places to be used.
I like to leave it that way,
if you don't want it to be used somewhere,
that's your prerogative,
you can make those changes,
you can say, okay, well,
I only want it to be used in alerts,
or I only want it to be used in filtering,
or what have you, doesn't really matter.
I like it to be able to be used anywhere,
I can't think of any situation off the top
of my head where it would be useful
to have it not be used somewhere.
You can also change them in any of your manage pages.
So let's start with Manage Nodes.
In Manage Nodes, you can select one
or you can select multiple
and you can edit the properties,
and you can change multiple properties.
But we're gonna talk about Custom Properties specifically.
So you can go in there and you can select
individual Custom Properties to change.
And I really like that you have to select the box
in order to make the change.
Now the reason is,
it prevents you from making changes unnecessarily.
So, you know, I can make edits to devices
that belong to the server team and the network team.
Like let's say they're all in the same location.
They're all in the same data center.
So I'm gonna change that location
to West data center.
But if I didn't have to select the box first
in order to make the change,
then I could accidentally change something else
that was important like,
like assign team.
And then I would change my server devices
to the network team, for instance.
And then you'd have to go back
and figure out what happened later.
Cause honestly, most of the time,
you're not gonna figure that out
until much later, when somebody complains
that they didn't get an alert,
or they didn't see something,
or it's not on their page anymore,
and they wanna know what happened,
and then you have to go figure it out.
So honestly, I like,
I like that you have to select the box first.
It prevents you from making changes unintentionally,
and really being intentional
with what changes you're making.
The same is true for interfaces.
If you have an interfaced Custom Property,
you can go back in there,
switch the property to interfaces,
and multi-select and edit,
you can also make changes in your applications
and application templates to your Custom Properties.
And in your Manage Storage Objects area.
And those are just the ones I'm showcasing today.
There are definitely many other places,
but pretty much anywhere you can edit properties
for that device, you can make changes
to your Custom Properties.
So now that you know how to create them,
and you know how to edit them
and change them,
I wanna talk about where you can use them
in your Orion Platform.
And the answer is just about anywhere.
They're so useful,
they're more useful in my opinion than groups are.
And I say that because the first thing
I wanna show you is how you can group things and resources.
So you can use them to filter your resources,
you can do it in multiple formats.
So here we've got a nodes list resource.
And in the nodes list,
we can group by Custom Properties, which I really like.
It's not the same as creating groups in Orion is
because there's not gonna be an assign status
for all of the items in there.
And one other really important place
that you can use Custom Properties
is in your account limitations and your page limitations.
Now, what are those?
You might be wondering.
Well, the limitation prevents people
from seeing anything that you don't want them to see.
So let's say you have,
or stick to our standard analogy
we've been using this whole time,
server team versus network team, well,
you're network team isn't interested
in any of the data on your servers.
And if they are, you might be questioning why.
Cause it's not their responsibility,
there's not any reason for them to know that information
and honestly, in my experience most of the time,
they see it as clutter
and it gets in the way of the data
that they're really interested in.
So what you can do is you can set up an account limitation
to say that you only want to show them
the network team assigned thing.
So if we have the Custom Property for assign team
that I mentioned, you set it to network,
and that's the way you do it.
That would prevent them from seeing on all
of their resources across their entire account.
So depend, you know, no matter what module they're on,
or what they're looking at, what pages they're on,
it's gonna automatically filter it down
to just the things that they care about.
And that's really important.
And the other place is page limitations.
So if you didn't wanna be so sweeping,
and you didn't want it to cover everything
across their account,
maybe you just wanna create a page for the database team
and it's just a single page.
And you want a lot of people to be able to see this,
Well, you can put a limitation on that page
so that everything on that page
is automatically filtered for you
and you don't have to filter the individual resources.
Another place that Custom Properties
are super useful, is in alerts.
So if you had one set to alert email, for instance,
and you used that email format in there, you know,
then you could set it up in your alert,
you can use that variable
so it will always pull that alert email address
from the Custom Property before it sends the email.
And then you don't have to worry about,
"Is it sending to the right person?
Is the right team getting notified of something?"
Just use an alert email,
just set it up,
you would have to worry about
if some of those emails changed.
If you're using personal email addresses, for instance,
say you have a smaller team.
So you have maybe three or four people
that need to receive emails.
While you might think,
"Oh, well, I'll just use, you know their email address."
Well, if they leave the company,
you have to remember to go change those.
Otherwise, there,
those those notifications are now gonna be lost.
So we wanna make sure that we're being intentional,
and we're keeping up and keeping clean our Orion instance.
You can also use them
just for filtering your trigger conditions.
So that, you know,
if you just wanna,
if you just wanna set up an alert for, let's say,
network nodes,
and you wanna know when,
when their latency is really high,
cause that's important.
And you only want it to be WAN devices
or something like that.
You can you can set that up in your triggering conditions
and your research conditions.
And then also if you just have information
that you wanna pass through your alert,
so that email that the team receives
has a specific information in there.
You can show your Custom Property information
in there as well.
Which means that if you've got Custom Properties
that are that are filled out from a CMDB,
or you're filling them out from the API,
or even if you're just manually filling them out,
but it's important information to receive
when an alert goes off,
you can include that information in your alert.
The second place of course I mentioned was reports.
And in reports I think this is more of a standard format
of where people expect to see Custom Property data
when they know what Custom Properties are.
Because they look at it more as data information,
instead of making a more broad use of using them
for variables and using for filtering or whatever,
then maybe they're using it just for data.
So there's information in there
that they wanna see for whatever reason,
and they've set it up as such.
So you can use them in your reports in that format.
You can use them for filtering,
just like with alerts.
And you can also just show them in your reports
and not required for filtering.
So if you wanted to have a report,
like the one I set up for Lab earlier this year.
It shows your empty Custom Properties
because, as I mentioned,
it's important for Custom Properties to be filled out
if you're using them in alerting.
So I wanted to know which ones were empty
so that I could go correct that issue.
And you can set up a report to show you that
and it shows multiple Custom Properties,
and it'll show you Custom Properties
if you just wanna see, you know,
information on a specific set of devices
and there is information in those Custom Properties,
you can display those as well.
Hopefully, we've encouraged you to use Custom Properties
in your environment if you're not already.
And if you are using them
or you're gonna start using them,
hopefully you get a little bit of the creative juices
flowing and you start to think about how you can use them
in a more effective and efficient way
to help your monitoring platform be better.
And to get a little bit more of that outside-the-box
thinking, please visit our other session
the 2020 session for Custom Properties,
where one of our THWACK MVPs is gonna show us
some kind of creative ways to use Custom Properties.