Alerts are displayed in the Monitoring task area on the Alerts tab. By viewing alerts, you can monitor data protection activity and error conditions in Data Protection Manager (DPM). You can group alerts by protection group, protected computer, severity, or status. You can also display inactive alerts to review past data protection and recovery activity.

Alert Severity

DPM displays each alert with one of three severities described in the following table.

Severity Description

Informational

Provides general information about DPM operations that might not require any action on your part.

Warning

Provides information about potential problems, such as “Disk threshold exceeded,” that might not require immediate action but should be investigated.

Critical

Provides information about problems that need immediate resolution. either by DPM or by you, to ensure that data is fully protected. “Replica missing” and “Disk missing” are examples of critical alerts.

Alert Status

DPM designates the status of an alert as active or inactive. DPM gives users the ability to mark alerts as inactive. Marking alerts as inactive can be done for a variety of reasons—for example, if the alert is no longer meaningful or if you do not plan to resolve the alert.

Note
Whether to mark an alert as inactive should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and should not done except when absolutely necessary.

An active alert is one that either DPM or the administrator must take action to resolve. An alert is designated as inactive when the associated jobs have completed successfully, the appropriate action has been taken to resolve the alert, the conditions that generated the alert no longer apply, or the administrator has marked the alert as inactive. In some cases, DPM automatically designates an alert as inactive after a pre-defined period of time. For example, a “Recovery success” informational alert becomes inactive after three days.

Dynamic Nature of Alerts

DPM alerts change dynamically in both severity and status after DPM completes jobs that resolve the alerts or when you take action to resolve them. For example, you might see an active, critical “Replica inconsistent” alert in the Monitoring task area. To resolve the alert, you manually synchronize the replica with consistency check or, if a daily consistency check is scheduled, DPM performs synchronization with consistency check. After a consistency check is successfully completed, the status of the “Replica inconsistent” alert is changed to inactive and the severity of the alert is changed to informational. The display pane displays only the current severity and status of the alert.

Relationship Between Alerts and Jobs

DPM provides both an alerts view and a jobs view so that you can easily locate both summary and detailed information about data protection activity. The Alerts tab aggregates errors, error conditions, and jobs to provide a summary view of what is happening across the entire system. The Jobs tab provides the operational details for each scheduled, completed, running, canceled, or failed job. For example, in response to multiple recovery point creation failures, the alerts view displays a single “Recovery point creation failures” alert, whereas the jobs view displays an entry for each recovery point creation failure. In the jobs view, you can also display completed recovery point creation jobs for the past 30 days and scheduled recovery point creation jobs for the next 7 days.

As a general rule, you should start troubleshooting an issue in DPM by reviewing the relevant alert details.

Note
In the Event log, a separate node called DPM Alerts is created. This contains some text in encrypted form and is not for the administrator's use. Instead, the DPM Operations Manager pack uses this to show DPM Alerts in its user interface.

See Also