Parameter replacements and its use with alert

Many of you probably know already, that alert’s description can use parameter replacements to reference the value of any of the properties of the data type causing the alert to be raised in the first place. I tried to comment on some most commonly used data types and its XML representation in order to help with writing replacement XPath query, which then yields such value as a result of its execution (see older postings about parameter replacements and data item XML).

Unfortunately what I forgot to stress out is that alert description is the only place where such replacement works. Recently I saw couple of requests to help with a replacement inside of alert name (to customer the use of replacement seemed as a good way to create more unique alert names especially when there could be a multiple triggers raising such alert and proper suppression had been used in order to "preserve" the alert for each one of them).

Here is a sample of incorrect alert configuration causing replacement string being treated as constant alert name:

Here is a sample of above alert configuration inside of active alert:

Conclusion:

For alert, data replacement works only inside of alert description with release of Operations Manager 2007 and Operations Manager 2007 SP1.