It’s our mission to detect problems before your users need to report them. But sometimes, we miss something, or you are looking for problems that our dashboard doesn’t detect. Enter, Custom Issues.

Custom Issues are issues where you decide what is considered a problem or incident, e.g. a backup failure that you wish to be notified about. Once you find a problem, you can select to send the issue to us. The Panorama9 system will then handle notifications, help desk ticket creation and display the issue within the Dashboard. Unlike issues that P9 has built-in capacity to detect and manage, custom issues are very free form. This allows a high degree of customization while leaving the dull work of managing reporting and tickets to us.

Table of contents

When you detect a problem and wish to report it, you must decide how Panorama9 should categorize the issue. Is the issue related to vulnerability, availability or compliance? You may select from one of these 6 different categories:

The last three - hardware-capacity, hardware-failure and service-running - are categories where your custom issue will co-exist with "built-in P9 discovered issues" and will be listed under "Availability" -> "Servers" or "Computers". The top three are fully custom categories where you can put anything you like. These will appear as the issue type "Other".

To create a custom issue you can use the command-line utility "p9-issue" or the Panorama9 API.

The command line utility is included and automatically installed on machines with the Panorama9 agent.

The way to use the command-line utility is probably in a small script you write, e.g. check if the machine is able to communicate with a critical server. Once the communication fails the script invokes the command-line utility "p9-issue" to report the problem.

When creating a custom issue you must assign it an "id". It allows the Panorama9 system to uniquely identify the custom issue. The "id" is important when either refreshing or marking the custom issue as resolved. (Note: The "id" uniqueness is only per machine)

How to create and resolve a custom issue using the command-line utility "p9-issue" installed with the Panorama9 agent.

Microsoft Windows: Create or resolve custom issues

Create a custom issue:

c:\Program Files (x86)\Panorama9>p9-issue.exe -type="custom-availability" -id="ping123" -text="Lost connection to Host" -desc="Machine can't connect to Server" -ttl="48"

Mark custom issue as resolved:

c:\Program Files (x86)\Panorama9>p9-issue.exe -type="custom-availability" -id="ping123" -close

(Note: Use argument "/?" to get more help.)

Linux/OS X: Create or resolve custom issues

Create a custom issue:

$ p9-issue --type custom-availability --id ping123 --issue "Lost connection to Host" --description "Machine can't connect to Server" --ttl 48

Mark custom issue as resolved:

$ p9-issue --type custom-availability --id ping123 --resolved

(Note: Use argument "--help" to get more help.)

If a custom issue isn't marked as resolved using the command-line utility "p9-issue" it will automatically be resolved once time-to-live expires. If the problem is still present you can tell Panorama9 that the custom issue shouldn't be resolved. Just refresh the custom issue by repeating the original command. That will cause the resolve time for the custom issue to be postponed until the new time-to-live expires - perhaps the biggest advantage is that help desk tickets will not be re-created and notifications not sent again.

If you've enabled help desk integration, then Panorama9 will not automatically close associated ticket when time-to-live expires. We only closes it when you run the "p9-issue" utility with the resolve option.

Custom issue can be disabled and not listed inside the Panorama9 dashboard under "Monitoring" -> "Availability" -> "Other monitors" -> "Custom issues". This will also disable any notifications.