Alerts and Holidays

I am very interested in any responses to your question. We have been struggling with false positives on holidays and wanted a simple way to turn off or turn on sets of alerts that should not be running on a holiday.

We looked at using the AND alert type, to connect a “normal” alert and a holiday alert (which could be a TCL alert that would look at a calendar file and figure out if today was a holiday), but we would need to do this for every normal alert, so we could easily end up with double the number of existing alerts.

i was hoping for an additional function contained in each alert that allows me to callout to a TCL and get a 0 or 1 return code – this would be in additional to all the other attributes of an alert.

So…  you may have to create an alternate alert file that you would load via the command line, that has the right alerts for that holiday.

I think this is the syntax??
<p class=”- topic/p p”>Use this format to run a specific alert. In this example, the alert file is named foo.alert:</p>

<pre class=”+ topic/pre pr-d/codeblock pre codeblock”><code>hcisitectl -s a -A “<var class=”+ topic/keyword sw-d/varname keyword varname”>a</var>=-cl foo.alert”</code></pre>
We played with this once and could not get the command line command to work so hopefully you will figure it out.

I’m not sure what you’re using as your alert action. You could potentially not put the holiday check in your alert rules but add it to the alert action. So if you have a script you’re calling to deliver the alert (email, calling a service, etc.), you could add something to that script to check for holidays before delivering the alert.

I’ve got a script that automatically calculates the holidays for our organization. I don’t use this from within alerts, but we have a separate thread that can send messages to staff through a secure messenger app. There are some checks in that process to see if it’s a holiday.