Regular Expression for filtering nas alarms based on host name

[Anon Anon]

I am new to Nimsoft and am trying to create nas alerts based on Production vs. Test servers.  I want to filter out Test servers in my Production server alert.  Our naming convention is as follows.

 

role - up to 6 characters

test designation (if applicable) - 4 characters

sequence - 2 digits

location - 3 characters

 

so as an example:  I have two servers

 

pimapp01sea - Production PIM Application Server 1 in Seattle

pimapptest01sea - Test PIM Application Server 1 in Seattle

 

I want to filter my alerts so that my Production nas profile only alerts for production servers.  I used RegexBuddy to create this expression and it test out fine in RegexBuddy but when I try it in Nimsoft it doesn't match the string.

 

[a-z]+(?<!test)[0-9]{2}sea\.domain\.com

 

Can anyone tell me what is wrong with my expression?  Any help is much appreciated.

[Anon Anon]

Okay, I figured it out myself.  I didn't realize that expressions had to have /^ at the beginning and / at the end.

 

This worked for me.

 

/^[a-z]+(?<!test)[0-9]{2}sea\.domain\.com/

[Anon Anon]

Just to clarify a little for those not used to working with regexes in Nimsoft probes:

 

The requirement in a lot of probes is that you need to surround the regex with slashes, like so:

/<regex>/

 

If you don't a text comparison is usually done instead, though some probes do allow pattern matching where the pattern will be turned into a regex. If you need to match on a slash you need to escape it with a backslash, otherwise you will proably confuse the regex engine quite a bit.

 

The ^ simply says that the regex has to match from the start of the line. A fine distinction, but it could turn out to be an important one!

 

Cheers,

Stian