Auvik’s Smart Alert Suppression helps reduce alert noise by preventing cascading alerts when a parent device—such as a core switch or firewall—goes offline. When enabled, Auvik uses its network topology map to identify downstream devices and suppress alerts from them if a parent device is offline.
This article explains how Smart Alert Suppression works, how to enable it, and important considerations before implementing it.
What Is Smart Alert Suppression?
When a parent device in your network goes offline, any devices connected downstream will also go offline. Without suppression, this can result in multiple redundant alerts. Smart Alert Suppression minimizes this noise by suppressing offline alerts from descendant devices once all parent devices are determined to be offline.
This functionality only applies to alerts created in Alerts 2.0. It does not impact alerts built using the legacy alerting system.
This feature works alongside alert suppression for sites, but if both are configured, alert suppression for sites is evaluated first.
Key Considerations Before Enabling
Before enabling this feature, ensure that your network topology in Auvik accurately reflects your real-world network design. Smart Alert Suppression relies on this topology to determine device relationships. An inaccurate topology could result in critical alerts being unintentionally suppressed.
Smart Alert Suppression is disabled by default. It must be enabled manually at each site and only affects Alerts 2.0.
Organizations using high availability (HA) failover are encouraged to test the feature in a limited environment before full deployment.
Because suppression timing is based on when Auvik identifies devices as offline, some alerts from downstream devices may still trigger before suppression takes effect.
Note: If the parent cannot be determined for a device (e.g., due to loops), the offline alerts for that device will not be suppressed.
How to Enable Smart Alert Suppression
To enable smart alert suppression at a site:
Log in to the desired site.
Navigate to Admin → Manage Alerts → Alert Suppression.
Toggle Smart Alert Suppression to Enabled.
Click Save.
To enable smart alert suppression on all or multiple sites:
Log in to the global site.
Navigate to Admin → Manage Alerts → Alert Suppression.
Select the sites you want to enable smart alert suppression.
This site and all children - For all sites
Specific organizations - To select specific sites
Click Select Orgs.
Select desired sites.
Click Save.
Click Save.Optimizing Parent Device Detection
To improve suppression accuracy, configure Auvik to detect parent devices as offline before their downstream devices.
Go to Admin → Discovery → Discovery Settings → Health Check Frequencies.
Add a rule targeting your parent devices (such as core switches, routers, or firewalls).
Place this rule at the top of the frequency table.
By increasing the polling frequency for these devices, Auvik is more likely to detect their status changes first, allowing suppression to trigger correctly for their downstream connections.