Better Alert Template management

  • Better Alert Template management

    Posted by bmcclure on October 31, 2009 at 00:52

    I like the new Alert template system, but I think it needs some improvement.

    Every template starts off as a blank slate, but that can be very unintuitive. I know you can clone alerts, but that’s not necessarily desired either.

    The problem is that many of the fields and settings are the same between my alert templates, mainly for the field1/field2/field3 values. It’s a pain to have to manage the contents of these fields individually, because when I want to change how my alerts appear, I have to make the exact same change to every single alert template.

    I see two solutions to this problem:

    1. The simpler solution would be the ability to create shared “blocks” of content that you can assign to a macro and use anywhere in your Alert Templates. This would not require huge changes to the Alert Template system since it already supports Macros, but would just require a Macro Management interface of some kind.

    2. The more advanced solution: Give Alert Templates their own template system at a higher level. When you create a new alert template, you could select from any of your pre-defined higher-level template types (TCP Service Down, Unknown Response, etc.). Each of those higher-level templates should have at least one overrideable area where the actual Alert Template can insert custom information without overriding the template completely (so that changes to unmodified parts of the parent template show up on all Alerts using them). This would essentially cut out the need to use the field1/field2/field3 settings within Alert Templates since they would be pulled down from the high-level template and customized with the other settings within the Alert Template, if that makes any sense 🙂

    #2 could create some confusion due to adding another level of abstraction, so #1 would be ideal–essentially just the ability to create and manage custom macros.

    bmcclure replied 15 years, 1 month ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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