When you create an Alert Description in OpsMgr 2007 for alerting rules and monitors.... you might have noticed there is no way to add a line break in between each parameter output you want... so the Alert Description is all jumbled together and hard to read.
For instance... I created an Alert generating event rule looking for event 6022 in the OperationsManager event log:
For the alert description available parameters... I go to my previous blog post.... and see what all is available for Windows Event Rules: http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2007/12/12/adding-custom-information-to-alert-descriptions-and-notifications.aspx
I decide I like all of those parameters... so I paste them all into my alert description in the rule:
EventDisplayNumber (Event ID): $Data/EventDisplayNumber$
EventDescription (Description): $Data/EventDescription$
Publisher Name (Event Source): $Data/PublisherName$
EventCategory: $Data/EventCategory$
LoggingComputer: $Data/LoggingComputer$
EventLevel: $Data/EventLevel$
Channel: $Data/Channel$
UserName: $Data/UserName$
EventNumber: $Data/EventNumber$
They look like this in the UI:
Here is the bad part.... when I get the alert in the console..... they come out like the following:
Very difficult to read.
Here is a tip....the output of an alert is HTML. Add <BR /> to your alert descriptions for a clean line break. I will modify this same rule to add line breaks to make it nicer:
Now - the alerts look MUCH nicer and more readable in the console:
Now - for the downside:
If you double click the alert.... the "<BR />" shows up as text, and it will show up in email notifications and across connectors to other systems. So you have to ask yourself.... do you want clean alerts in the viewing pane of the console.... or less clutter in an email notification?
This is how they look in email:
