What would be the best and easiest way to disable alert messages when doing maintenance on the SAM server?

Hi,

We were doing MS 2003 server patches the other day and we rcvd 100's of alert emails. I'm wondering if next month, there is a better way than just turning off (individually) all the alerts prior to doing the maintenance?

Cheers,

archerinvan

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Accepted answers

aLTeReGo

I agree that unmanaging is probably the best/proper way, but what kind of alerts do you have setup? Are you using Basic or Advanced Alerts? If you're using Advanced Alerts the simplest/easiest way would be to stop/disable the Advanced Alert Manager service during this time if you didn't want to receive ANY alerts from SAM.

All comments

bsciencefiction.tv

Scheduled Maintenancethrough the unmanage Scheduling Utility

aLTeReGo

FormerMember

Thank you. I went in and set it up for next time. I choose both nodes and apps - not sure if both were necessary or if nodes would have sufficed. Thanks fo your help.

FormerMember

Thank you for your reply. Stopping the Alert Manager Engine Service is very quick compared to using the Scheduled Maintenance. Have put both methods into our documentation. Thanks for replying.

adatole

Another option I've used in the past is to disable the mail piece. Options include:

if you are using an account to authenticate to the email server, disable THAT
If you aren't using an account, then you are using POP. Consider setting up a different port for the POP connection (or at least for Solarwinds' POP connection. Then turn off that port when you want to disable emails.
slightly off that option is to add an entry in the polling engine's hosts file (\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) that points the email server name to localhost. Remove it once maintenance is done
Another solution that needs some previous setup is to create a custom field for maintenance (and ONLY use it for this kind of thing). All your alerts would then need to include "if maintcheck = 1" in the logic. When you are ready for maintenance, set that field to 1 (either through ManagedNodes, Manage Properties, or a straight database update query)

I'm sure there are more options. Hope these help!

FormerMember

Thanks for the additional options. The custom field idea has given me an idea for other situations as well. Thanks.

adatole

Look through my "stop the madness" posts for a whole series of ideas that use custom properties.