Server Monitoring - Alerts Object

The first thing that I'm going do is create the object in which my alerts are going to live in Salesforce.  For this example, I'm going to create a dedicated custom object for this.  You may want to use Chatter or even incorporate it into your existing structure; perhaps you have some sort of IT inventory (who doesn't?) objects that you can connect to.

The basics of what we need are:

• The resource - what device is having an issue
• The alert - details about the issue the resource is having (low disk space for our usage)

This is how I'm configuring the object on the "New Custom Object" page:



I've checked off both "Allow Reports" and "Allow Activities."  Ideally, when the alerts are configuring and being dumped into Salesforce, I will be building workflow to send off some e-mails.  Then I'll begin building a few reports for any notifications over the course of time - scheduled weekly emails of low system resources sounds kind of cool.  Imagine that patterns you could observe over the course of a few months.  I've also enabled notes and attachments as I imagine this could be used for future issue identification and resolution as well.  Feel free to create a tab for this if you'd like.

Once the object is created, I've got my shell of an object with the basic fields:

• Alert Name - auto number
• Created By
• Last Modified By
• Owner

Now I'm going to add my two custom fields mentioned above and listed below:

• Resource
• Details



I've required that the "Resource" field be populated at the field level.  Don't forget to set the correct permissions for these fields based on profiles on the following screen.

Not a lot of rocket science in this post, but at least now we've got our object for which we'll insert our alert records into.  The next posts will be a little more exciting and cover creating and scheduling a batch file for performing a disk space checks and creating a Windows Perfmon alert.