Work with alerts
Updated: May 13, 2016
Applies To: System Center 2012 SP1 - Data Protection Manager, System Center Data Protection Manager 2010, System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager
This section explains how alerts work and how to interact with them.
Alerts overview
Publish alerts
Display alert details
Display inactive alerts
Alerts overview
Alerts are displayed in the Monitoring view on the Alerts workspace. You can group alerts by protection group, protected computer, severity, or status. You can also display inactive alerts to review past data protection and recovery activity. Alerts can have one of three severity levels:
| Severity | Description |
|---|---|
| Informational | Provides general information about DPM operations that might not require any action on your part. |
| Warning | Provides information about potential problems, such as “Disk threshold exceeded,” that might not require immediate action but should be investigated. |
| Critical | Provides information about problems that need immediate resolution, either by DPM or by you, to ensure that data is fully protected. “Replica missing” and “Disk missing” are examples of critical alerts. |
Alerts can be active or inactive. Note the following:
An active alert is one that needs to be resolved.
An alert is designated as inactive when the associated jobs have completed successfully, the appropriate resolution has occurred, the conditions that generated the alert no longer apply, or you marked the alert as inactive. In some cases, DPM automatically designates an alert as inactive after a pre-defined period of time. For example, a “Recovery success” informational alert becomes inactive after three days.
You can mark an alert as inactive if it’s no longer relevant or you aren’t going to resolve it. You shouldn’t do this unless necessary.
DPM alerts change dynamically in both severity and status as jobs or actions are taken that resolve them. For example a “Replica inconsistent” alert will be resolved when you manually synchronize the replica with a consistency check.
Jobs and alerts
DPM provides both an alerts view and a jobs view so that you can easily locate both summary and detailed information about data protection activity. These are different as follows:, and jobs to provide a summary view of what is happening across the entire system.
The Alerts workspace aggregates errors, error conditions. To troubleshoot an issue you’ll generally start with alerts.
The Jobs workspace provides the operational details for each scheduled, completed, running, canceled, or failed job. For example, in response to multiple recovery point creation failures, the alerts view displays a single “Recovery point creation failures” alert, whereas the jobs view displays an entry for each recovery point creation failure. In the jobs view, you can also display completed recovery point creation jobs for the past 30 days and scheduled recovery point creation jobs for the next 7 days.
Event Viewer
In the Windows Event Viewer a separate node called DPM Alerts is created. This contains some text in encrypted form and is not for the administrator's use. Instead, the System Center Management Pack for Data Protection Manager uses this to show DPM Alerts in its user interface.
Publish alerts
The Alert Publishing option in the Monitoring view is used only if you have chosen to centrally monitor your servers using System Center Operations Manager. It publishes all existing actionable DPM alerts to the DPM Alerts event log. The Operations Manager agent on the DPM server publishes the alerts to Operations Manager and continues to update the display as new alerts are generated.
Display alert details
In the Alerts workspace of the Monitoring view, you can group alerts by Protection Group, Computer, Status, or Severity. Use Quick Search to gather alert information.
Display inactive alerts
In System Center 2012 – Data Protection Manager (DPM), when an alert is resolved or when the conditions that generated the alert no longer apply, the alert becomes inactive. When the Show inactive alerts option is enabled, inactive alerts are displayed for seven days in the Alerts workspace of the Monitoring view. After an alert has been inactive for seven days, it is removed from the inactive alerts history and it can no longer be displayed.
If you want to display inactive alerts, you can enable the Show inactive alerts option. When the Show inactive alerts option is enabled, a status category is added to the Alerts workspace in the Monitoring view. When you group alerts by protection group, computer, or severity, a status column is added that indicates whether an alert is active or inactive. When you group alerts by status, the alerts are displayed in two groups: Active and Inactive.
If you mark an alert as Inactive the status for the protection group will change to OK in both DPM monitoring and in Operations Manager if it’s being used.