Old Job Failures re-alert after upgrading to 9.0.3

Luke L

We upgraded to 9.0.3.20042.  Once this was completed and the base monitor came back online, we received a lot of failed job alert emailed from failures that had occurred months before hand.  These failures had already been addressed and the alerts cleared.  We assumed this was a one time issue.

We suspended monitoring on a few instances in order to restart them.  When monitoring was re-enabled, all of the failed jobs re-alerted again.  This is an issue.  When we suspend monitoring for maintenance we shouldn't be re-alerted for jobs which failed months ago when monitoring is restarted.

We've tried to use maintenance windows, but these don't silence alerts from server down, cluster fail-over etc, which is required when applying patches etc.

Is there something else we should be doing in order to no longer receive these alert emails for alerts which were cleared previously?

Thanks,
-Luke.

Russell D

This sounds like a bug really, if you've got a valid support contract I'd log it through there for further investigation.

Regarding the maintenance window, as per the documentation here: https://documentation.red-gate.com/sm9/configuring-sql-monitor/configuring-monitored-servers/setting-maintenance-windows/list-of-alerts-suspended-during-maintenance-windows, the alerts you're talking about aren't suspended by default in Monitor. You'd need to edit the database in order to change that.

You can get the list of alerts and their relevant ID from the alert.Alert_Type table, and you'd need to then add the alerts you want to exclude to the list into the keyValue of the MaintenanceWindow-AlertsToExclude key in the settings.KeyValuePairs table, and then restart the BaseMonitor.

Luke L

Russell, thanks for the information.  I believe we're goign tot try an upgrade to 9.0.5 first and make certian it's not fixed already before we open a support case.  

Also, the Maintenance window information is very helpful... We'll work on modifying that so that we can actually make use of maintenance windows again.  If we modify this manually in the database will this be reset by future upgrades? 

I vaguely remember this being talked about in the SQL monitor forum that this ability to choose what is silenced in a maintenance window be made into a feature.  It looks like it's already there and now just needs GUI?  I know this has been asked about on the UserVoice forum before.  Any chance that will get completed in the near future since it just need a few checkboxes to turn them on and off? Or perhaps just officially added to the Product documentation?

Thanks,
-Luke.

Russell D

@Luke L no this table will not be touched by updates under normal circumstances, but if there are any circumstances that arise that require this it will definitely be noted as a warning in the release notes.

Discussions regarding this making it into the UI are - at this stage - unfortunately still ongoing. That said, we've a number of issues with Maintenance Windows and it is [very] high on our priority list to revisit this functionality entirely. All I can really say is "watch this space" at this stage but we do need to work on it.