Ever since we upgraded to the latest version of NPM our systems alert emails verbiage has changed. I am trying to find a way for our DB guys to go into our old backups and just pull the alerts...if it's possible??
There is probably some tables that can be restored to put the alerts back to where they were before the upgrade, but I would talk to support about that even if someone here were to list the specific tables and sounded real confident about it.
As an alternative, can you restore your entire setup to an isolated network. You just need the SQL database server and the primary polling engine. If you get that working, then you can export the alerts, copy the exported files over, and import them into your current system.
There is no easy way to do so. If you specifically wanted to see the email verbiage for Trigger Actions, you can query the table called 'ActionsProperties' and the 'PropertyValue' column will include the verbiage. This query would work:
SELECT * FROM [dbo].[ActionsProperties]
WHERE PropertyName = 'EmailMessage'
If you wanted to see the name of the action you would need to join that table with the table called 'Actions' using the column 'ActionID'.
It might still be easier to restore the entire setup and export the alerts that way.
a colleague of mine mentioned he saw that the syntax of some of the sam alert variables changed in this release, you could be running into that. In which case the old copy wouldn't fix your issue, you'd just need to figure out what variables need to be swapped in. An upgrade normally shouldn't change any verbiage unless maybe you were still using an OOTB alert.
Thanks everyone! We were hoping by some miracle someone knew the tables or ran into this. Every alert we had that used to say things specific like "Memory usage over 97% on {node whatever}" in the subject line of the alert emails now say "Error on {whatever node}" and is very vague - this changed the day we upgraded. I created a ticket and their best answer was to restore the system to a back up because they had no way to pull the alerts specificially. This isn't a possible answer for us because we upgraded to fix not being able to get into the alert manager at all. As of now I am hand jamming a ton of alerts subject lines as we are working to build two brand new servers to start fresh from anyhow.
Just a note, especially since you are starting fresh. Never use the built-in alerts or actions, except to test with. Once you have an alert you like, copy it, even if you don't change it. Now it's your "User-Defined" alert that should not get changed in upgrades. Personally I also change the name so that it has some specific identifier to you, I also rename the actions with the same identifier. For me the identifier is our company name that I add to the front of every alert, action, and custom SAM template.
Thanks! Unfortunately this go around the list of alerts that were changed were user-defined. I will definitely keep this in mind for the new setup though.
