Does Message Center also search/display past or inactive alerts?

We're trying to investigate an alert that we havebut we can't find it in Message Center. I suspect the reset condition has been met, so it no longer appears in the active alerts.. but I also can't find it in Message Center? Or does message center ALSO only show active alerts?

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vinay.by

Message Center should show both active and historical - the issue could be somewhere else - validate your alert actions to start with.

stuartd

My experience of Message Centre is that the GUI is not very good at displaying much more than about 2k events. This becomes an issue when it gets filled by 1000's of messages like:

This happens because engineers configure their devices to send traps, etc but as they aren't in SW it doesn't recognise them. Instead, we resort to crafting reports to extract information from the DB.

ralphpost

My experience is that you do not see any alert info in Message Center (with the Events box ticked). There is the alerts box but that only shows Active alerts.

If the Alert trigger and reset action do not include a Log to NetPerfmon action then I do not believe you will see any events for alerts (possibly you may for trigger but I have distinct memories of trying to find Alert Triggered and Alert Rest events and coming up blank).

In the past, at one company I worked at, I had the practice of, for every alert, a Trigger Action and Reset Action that would write to the Log with relevant data in each identifying if Trigger or Reset and other relavant data. From memory I formatted in a way that searching for the Trigger and Reset events was simplified - i.e. Trigger event was wrapped with "-- Alert Trigger --" and Reset event with "-- Alert Reset --". This made searching and report creation for just these events simpler.

In current role have been meaning to convert our alerting to similar but not gotten around to yet (alerts need a cleanup and not trivial here .

I have since become very familiar with the AlertsHistory table in the DB. This is what you want to look at and contains the relevant info for all alerts, actions etc. - i.e. entry for alert triggered, actions for and if successful or not, reset triggered, actions for and if successful or not. Helpful data to have to find what you are looking for is AlertID (need to look in other tables for these) though you can get by that by searching within attributes for NodeID/Name, Alert Name etc. with SQL "like '&name_whatever&' etc.

Edit: another gotcha for the AlertyHistory view table - the times in there are UTC - so you need to convert to your local time to ensure the recored you are looking at is the one you expect (or to work out what (local) day/time that particular event occurred/was processed.). Relevant for us as we vary between +10 - +11 hours UTC and have to factor this in when querying the data.