SCOM Notifications Not Working:

Notifications in SCOM can be a great thing to work with. However, when some or more Subscriptions don’t work as intended, it can be a challenge to solve it. I have blogged about some issues one can bump into, found here.

New issue
Recently I bumped into an issue where some Subscriptions didn’t work. Out of six subscriptions, 3 didn’t send out anything while they were using the same Notification Channel and Subscribers. So something else was at play here, with the Subscriptions themselves.

Time to investigate
When I ran a comparison I found out that the functional Subscriptions were targeted against Groups (among other Criteria) and the non-functional ones targeted against an instance with a specific name (raised by an instance with a specific name). And for two of those Subscriptions, many servers were added to it.

Time for a test
I copied the server names, put them in a custom Group and retargeted the Subscriptions. Instead of using the Criteria ‘raised by an instance with a specific name’, I used the new Group. Saved the Changes and waited. Soon some Alerts were raised which related to the Subscriptions and within a minute the first Subscriptions were sent! Nice!

I changed the other Subscriptions as well to use Groups instead of the instance with a specific name, and all works just fine now. In order to get Alerts as well when the servers aren’t operational as well, I added per server the related Health Service Watcher (Agent) object as well.

So whenever using Subscriptions and some aren’t working, check out the Criteria. Sometimes the cause issues.