An alert indicates the severity, or importance, of an event or performance threshold. Typically, alerts indicate potential problems. Alerts can also indicate informational events, or events classified as "None." Alerts help you prioritize conditions.
Management Pack modules provide predefined alerts for events and thresholds specific to the monitored environment or application. You can also create your own alerts to meet the needs of your enterprise.
You create alerts within processing rules using the Rules snap-in. Processing rules tell Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 when to generate alerts and how to respond if the alert occurs.
You monitor alert occurrence using the Monitor snap-in or the Web Console. You can create alert views that display exactly what you want to monitor, including alerts from specific computers, alerts of only a particular severity, or alerts with a specific resolution state.
An event or performance threshold can generate more than one alert. For example, one processing rule can specify that a hard disk failure event generates a Critical Error alert. The Critical Error alert initiates a notification response and pages a network administrator with pertinent information about the hard disk failure. Another processing rule can define that the same hard disk failure event also generates an Error alert that sends an SNMP trap to an administrator.
The lifecycle of an alert comprises several stages, described in the following sections: