SQL Monitor 3.1

Walkthrough 6: Alert Configuration

In this walkthrough, we'll configure SQL Monitor's alert settings. This is handled in the Alert settings page, under the Configuration tab.

Clicking on Alert settings takes us to the All Servers configuration level.

This is a sensible way to configure alerts for all your servers at once, but if we want to configure an alert which has already been raised - for example, because it's being raised at too low a threshold - we can do so from the raised alert itself, using the Actions drop-down menu in the Alert Inbox.

This will take us straight to the settings for the affected object. For now, however, we'll work down from the All Servers level.

Alert settings work hierarchically; unless you have specified otherwise, settings at each level, such as database or disk, are inherited from the level immediately above. Initially, all alerts are inherited from the All Servers level.

All alert types can be customized individually for each object being monitored, but we can also customize alerts for groups of objects, as we'll see at the end of the walkthrough, or set the defaults for all objects.

To configure an alert type at a given level, we navigate to that level in the Monitored servers list, or use the links in the breadcrumb at the top of the page.

Selecting a particular level updates our list of alerts to match those that apply to this level. For example, here we have the list of alerts that apply at the database level.

We click on an alert to edit it. This takes us to the configuration settings for that alert, at that level; this is also where we would arrive if we started from a raised alert of this kind.

Customizing Alerts

Initially, the Inherit settings option is selected. The level that settings are inherited from is shown underneath the Inherit settings option.

To customize the alert, we select 'Customize settings for this level' at the top of the page, which makes the other options available. Any levels beneath the current one will inherit these changes. For example, all databases on a server will inherit settings made at the server level.

For each alert type, we can:

• Disable the alert.
• Set alert levels.
• Set the email recipient.

Disabling and Enabling Alerts

All alerts except Processor under-utilization are enabled by default when you first run SQL Monitor.

Changing a particular alert to Disabled prevents it being raised in future. If there are currently Active alerts of that type, they will be updated to Ended when SQL Monitor next polls your servers.

Alert Levels

Alert levels are organized in one of two ways, depending on the alert type. Some alerts are raised at only one level, i.e. every time the alert is raised, it is raised at either High, Medium, or Low level, depending on what we have specified. For example, here we have set a Database unavailable alert to High.

Other alerts can be escalated through all three levels, in which case we can specify the thresholds at which the alert level should escalate. This happens automatically in the alert inbox. Not all levels need to be enabled. For example, on this Fragmented indexes alert, we have only enabled High and Medium levels.

Email Notifications

There are two options for email notifications:

• Use default email recipient. This sends email notifications to the address specified in the Email settings page.
• Specify an email recipient. This sends email notifications to the address(es) specified in the alert configuration.

To disable email alerts, we can clear the Send email notifications to box.

Note that before SQL Monitor will send any emails, mail settings must be set up in the Configure email settings page.

To apply changes, we click Apply changes at the bottom of the page.

Configuring Multiple Alerts

To configure multiple alerts together, we return to the Alert settings page, and select the alerts we're interested in, using the check boxes or the Select drop-down list. We then click Configure alerts.

A limited set of options apply to multiple alerts: we can configure whether they are enabled or disabled, and apply joint email notification properties.

We can also check how many alerts have been customized at each level in the Monitored servers list. They're indicated by the number in brackets. When a particular level is selected, the configured alerts are identified by a <This level> tag and are highlighted in bold.