Understanding alerts
Published : April 8, 2005 | Updated : August 17, 2005
Alerts are displayed in the Monitoring task area on the Alerts tab. By viewing alerts, you can monitor data protection activity, job status, and error conditions in Data Protection Manager (DPM). You can group alerts by protection group, protected file server, severity, or status. You can also display inactive alerts to review past data protection and recovery activity.
Alert severity
DPM displays each alert with one of three severities described in the following table:
Severity |
Description |
|---|---|
Informational |
Provides general information about data protection activities, such as job status or “New servers found,” that may not require any action on your part. |
Warning |
Provides information about potential problems, such as “Disk threshold exceeded,” that may 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. |
Alert status
DPM designates the status of an alert as active or inactive. You cannot manually change the status of an alert. An active alert is one that either DPM or the administrator must take action to resolve. An alert is designated as inactive when the associated jobs have completed successfully, the appropriate action has been taken to resolve the alert, or the conditions that generated the alert no longer apply. In some cases, DPM automatically designates an alert as inactive after a pre-defined period of time. For example, a “Recovery collection completed successfully” alert becomes inactive two days after the recovery is completed and a “New servers found” alert becomes inactive after seven days.
Dynamic nature of alerts
DPM alerts change dynamically in both severity and status after DPM completes jobs that resolve the alerts or when you take action to resolve them. For example, you might see an active, critical “Replica is inconsistent” alert in the Monitoring task area. To resolve the alert, you manually synchronize the replica with consistency check or, if a daily consistency check is scheduled, DPM performs synchronization with consistency check. After a consistency check is successfully completed, the status of the “Replica is inconsistent” alert is changed to inactive and the severity of the alert is changed to informational. The display pane only displays the current severity and status of the alert.
Relationship between alerts and jobs
DPM provides both an alerts view and a jobs view so you can easily locate both summary and detailed information about data protection activity. The Alerts tab aggregates alerts, error conditions, and jobs to provide a summary view of what is happening across the entire system. The Jobs tab provides the operational details for each scheduled, completed, running, canceled, or failed job. For example, in response to multiple shadow copy job failures of the same replica, the alerts view displays a single “shadow copy failure” alert, whereas the jobs view displays an entry for each shadow copy job failure. In the jobs view, you can also display completed shadow copy jobs for the past 30 days and scheduled shadow copy jobs for the next seven days.
As a general rule, you should start troubleshooting an issue in DPM by reviewing the relevant alert details. For detailed information about a specific job related to the issue, review the job details.