Scoping an Alert View to a Specific Alert

A customer the other day e-mailed me and asked how he could scope a view in the Operations console to a specific alert. In this scenario it was the "Database Backup Failed to Complete" alert from the SQL Server management pack and the view would be presented to the SQL DB Admins team. This is a pretty simple view to create, although perhaps not obvious when sorting through the conditions in the properties of the alert view. I don't know if others have found this to be a challenge, so forgive me if this is obvious and not worthy of an entry on my blog. 

Perform the following to filter a view on an alert rule:

  1. In the Operations Manager Console, Monitoring view, right-click in the left-hand pane and select the option "New\Alert View".

  2. In the Properties window, for the option "Show data related to" click on the command button with the ellipse and select the appropriate target if the rule is duplicated between different versions of the application/service (an example would be SQL Server 2005 vs. 2008) for granular filtering, or leave it at the default of "Entity" if you don't want or need to filter.

  3. Under the Select conditions section of the window, select the option "with a specific name" and click on the hyperlink under the Criteria description (click on the underlined value to edit) section of the Properties window.

  4. In the Alert Name window, enter in the text box the exact name of the alert and press the OK button.

  5. In the Properties window, press the OK button to save your changes.

Now when you select that view, you should see the specific alerts that you defined the view for presented for review. If I filtered the view on the alert rule "Database Backup Failed to Complete", I would see those alerts, if generated, in the view.