System Center Advisor Day 3: What happened to my alerts?

Yesterday I posted that System Center Advisor had found several alerts for me to look at the day after I installed it:

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2011/03/24/system-center-advisor-the-next-day.aspx

We focused on the top 2 “Error” alerts which were recommended Windows updates. I decided to go ahead and apply these fixes last night to this server.

Today when I came into the office, I signed into System Center Advisor again and found these 2 alerts were gone? Before I show you what happened I wanted to point out another great advantage of System Center Advisor being a cloud service.  Today when I came into the office, I didn’t even logon to the server where I had installed System Center Advisor. I signed in on my laptop at www.systemcenteradvisor.com and used the same LiveID I used when installing System Center Advisor on that server. Anywhere I have internet connectivity I can view the current status of my servers.

When I signed in,  this is what my initial page looked like:

image

If you have been reading my blogs, you will see that there are no red icons. No errors or “critical alerts”. Where did they go?

Notice the columns of this grid. To the right you can see a column called Status. Note that all of the alerts have a Status = Active.

Let’s zoom in a bit and look at the column header for status

image

The “funnel” icon symbolizes the Ability to “filter” on status values. If we click this icon, the following appears:

image

By default we only show you Active alerts. Let’s change this and uncheck Active and check Closed. The Alert “grid” now changes to this:

image

The two alerts I’ve highlighted are closed alerts. Who closed them? System Center Advisor did this automatically. In this RC release, a feature was added that detects when an alert condition has been resolved and will mark the alert closed. Now you know you have addressed the problem in the alert. This is a really nice feature. Now your alert grid can become a “todo list” of actions to take on recommended alerts. As you work through to resolve these, System Center Advisor will close them and save that state in the backend database so you can review a history of these. In fact, the other alerts on the closed list are from earlier tests I had run on a different server back in the Atlanta beta.

I’ve shown you today how Atlanta can detect when you have taken action on alerts you believe make sense for your environment. Next week we will look at other rules Atlanta has detected on this server and other features you can use to manage the recommendations System Center provides you to help manage your Windows and SQL Server systems.

 

Bob Ward
Microsoft