Nice clean Alert descriptions have been added to R2. Ahem.
I didn't realize this feature got added – very nice.
In OpsMgr SP1 – we had to use some hacks to get the Alert Description formatted to be nicely readable. I wrote about this HERE. The problem was – we could add a </BR> to the alert description and get this to work in SP1 – but in the email subscriptions – it was not formatted the same way and showed the <BR /> in text. You you could have good readable emails or good readable alerts – but not both.
Now – in R2 – this is a much better story.
When authoring a rule against a test event, I can now hit “Enter” and start a new line, just like it should be:
In the console, this now formats exceptionally well – as expected:
However – the email is close – but not perfect. This works most of the time as designed – but occasionally the email subscription does not pick up on the carriage returns.
Note the blobs in yellow above – this is where the Carriage Return did not get picked up.
All is not lost!
One trick – is that this might be caused by ending the line with a variable – as is my example. What I did – was to simply end each variable statement with a real character – I simply added a “period” after each variable as shown:
Which now shows the email formatting as desired:
The XML:
What this does – behind the scenes – is adds the following to the Alert Message ID Display String: (Basically – you can just add carriage returns in the XML and it will be picked up correctly in R2):
<DisplayString ElementID="MomUIGeneratedRule3407012ebced48c38440ed666eb0ae09.AlertMessage">
<Name>Custom - Test alert on event 100 from rule</Name>
<Description>A test event occurred.
The Event ID is: {0}.
The Logging Computer is: {1}.
The Event Source is: {2}.
The Event Level is: {3}.
Event Description = {4}</Description>
</DisplayString>
What do the {numbers} mean? Those are alert parameters. It gets those from the Alert params section in the Rule XML:
<WriteAction ID="Alert" TypeID="Health!System.Health.GenerateAlert">
<Priority>2</Priority>
<Severity>2</Severity>
<AlertOwner />
<AlertMessageId>$MPElement[Name="MomUIGeneratedRule3407012ebced48c38440ed666eb0ae09.AlertMessage"]$</AlertMessageId>
<AlertParameters>
<AlertParameter1>$Data/EventNumber$</AlertParameter1>
<AlertParameter2>$Data/LoggingComputer$</AlertParameter2>
<AlertParameter3>$Data/EventSourceName$</AlertParameter3>
<AlertParameter4>$Data/EventLevel$</AlertParameter4>
<AlertParameter5>$Data/EventDescription$</AlertParameter5>
</AlertParameters>
<Suppression />
<Custom1 />
<Custom2 />
<Custom3 />
<Custom4 />
<Custom5 />
<Custom6 />
<Custom7 />
<Custom8 />
<Custom9 />
<Custom10 />
</WriteAction>
