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Understanding the lifecycle of Operations Center events

Troubleshooting


Problem

Tivoli® Storage Manager can send an email when an alert is triggered. Sometimes an alert can keep showing up, causing a not immediate understanding of why it is still in place.

Diagnosing The Problem

An alert represents one or more error messages that are issued by a Tivoli Storage Manager server.

The Operations Center provides three different alert states:

  • active
  • inactive
  • closed

The "SET ALERTUPDATEINTERVAL" command can be used to specify how often the alert monitor updates and prunes alerts that are stored in the Tivoli® Storage Manager server database.


During this check interval, the alert monitor examines each alert on the server and completes the following actions:
  • The alert monitor determines whether the active or inactive durations elapsed.
If the specified duration elapses, the alert status is updated to the next state.
For example:
  • Active to Inactive
  • Inactive to Closed
The check for whether or not the "Status Refresh Interval" (visible in the output of the command "QUERY MONITORSTATUS") has elapsed is made whenever a new message shows up in the activity log.
This means a server that isn't doing anything won't ever update the alert status.
Normally, this won't happen in a Customer environment because the servers are always busy and messages are always being written to the activity log.
Some old alerts can keep showing up, causing a not immediate understanding of when and why the events are still shown.

Resolving The Problem

** Note: durations are cumulative. **

An alert has to go through all the stages (active, inactive, closed) before it gets deleted.
For example having set the following durations as for the output of QUERY MONITORSETTINGS:


Alert Duration (Minutes)
Active 4320
Inactive 10080
Closed 43200

i.e.
active duration ---> 3 days
inactive duration -----> 7 days
closed duration ------> 30 days

So it will take at least 40 days from the time an alert is generated to the time it can be deleted.
It could be good to act and balance the three durations to avoid unexpected length or unwanted events expiration.
For more information on how to set the different durations and their difference, please see the following commands (URLs can be found at the bottom of this page):

SET ALERTACTIVEDURATION
SET ALERTINACTIVEDURATION
SET ALERTCLOSEDURATION

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Document Information

Modified date:
17 June 2018

UID

swg21883421