OpsMgr 2007 Tip: The alert context in a closed Operations Manager alert may not indicate an unhealthy state

Article
05/18/2011

Hi everyone, my name is Rich Pesenko and I wanted to give you a quick tip on using alerts in OpsMgr 2007. Specifically, I wanted to talk about how the "alert context" section of a closed alert in Operations Manager 2007 may not reflect the conditions that caused the alert to be generated. Rather, the data may indicate conditions that would be evaluated as "healthy" in the monitor that generated the alert.

This can happened because alerts generated from two-state or three-state monitors will have the "alert context" section updated each time the monitor changes state until the alert is closed. The "alert context" section of an open alert will show the conditions that caused the alert to be generated, as expected. In a closed alert, however, the "alert context" section will show the conditions that caused the monitor to return to a "healthy" state and allowed the alert to be closed.

This is by design as the "alert context" is used to track the last known state of the alert. Health Explorer can be used to track the historical conditions that resulted in state changes for monitors assigned to an object.

Additional Notes:

Alert notifications that include "alert context" as part of the body will always show the conditions that occurred the moment the notification was generated. The "alert context" data in an alert notification does not change even after the alert is automatically closed by the monitor returning to "healthy" state.

Manual reset monitors and timed reset monitors may not populate the "alert context" section. If they do, there is no condition to return the monitor to "healthy" state so the "alert context" section does not get updated.

Hope this helps,

Rich Pesenko | Senior Support Escalation Engineer

OpsMgr 2007 Tip: The alert context in a closed Operations Manager alert may not indicate an unhealthy state

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