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:
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
The “funnel” icon symbolizes the Ability to “filter” on status values. If we click this icon, the following appears:
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:
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
Comments
Anonymous
March 24, 2011
Hi Bob Excellent series of posts on SCA. I tried installing the Gateway and Agent on one of my VM's and the installer failed, no installation logs, or other diagnostic information to be able to troubleshoot it. How should I go about it? Regards ChiragAnonymous
March 24, 2011
Chirag, The fastest way to resolve this is to get support for this from the System Center Advisor team. They also need to see these types of problem. So either post a question on the Microsoft Atlanta Connect site at: innovation.connect.microsoft.com/microsoftatlanta or submit a support request through this URL: onlinehelp.microsoft.com/.../gg132938.aspx Bob WardAnonymous
March 28, 2011
Hey Chirag, You should be able to find the Advisor setup logs in the %temp% directory. If you'd like to create an easier to find log, try this command: "AdvisorSetup.exe /l*v C:Advisor.log" We will update our documentation to make it easier to find the GUI setup logs. Once that happens, we'll post the link here. Paul Mestemaker Sr. Program Manager System Center Advisor