Filtering notification messages in activity log and stdlog

Products

• CA Service Desk Manager
• CA Service Management - Service Desk Manager
• ServiceDesk

Issue/Introduction

The following article describes a set of environment variables one may use to suppress activity log and stdlog messages pertaining to notifications

Environment

Release:  14.1 or higher
CA Service Desk Manager

Resolution

In the default installation of SDM, the following variables are present in the NX.env at their default settings and values

# set to 1 to skip the log message when system attempts to send a notification to a contact with no method set.
@NX_SKIP_NO_NOTIFICATION_LOG=0

# set to 1 to skip the log message when system attempts to send an email notification to a contact with no email address set.
@NX_SKIP_NO_EMAIL_NOTIFICATION_LOG=0

 

The above entries should be set with “pdm_options_mgr” to ensure that both the NX.env and its associated template file are updated.  These steps are detailed below.  If you have multiple servers, the pdm_options_mgr command should be run on those as well to ensure that all files are aligned.  This change requires a recycle of CA Service Desk services to invoke the change.

Message “No notification method”

This is controlled by “@NX_SKIP_NO_NOTIFICATION_LOG.”  Setting a value of “1” will suppress the warning message in the STDLOG.  

stdlog entry suppressed:

SDM-SERVER spelsrvr                5356 SIGNIFICANT  cnt.spl               1282 AHD05376:The '[example contact] ' contact did not receive a notification - no notification method specified for level Normal.

 

Activity Log entry suppressed:

AHD05376:The '[example contact] ' contact did not receive a notification - no notification method specified for level Normal.

This value only impacts the writing of the message to the STDLOG. The message written to the ticket in the web client “Notification History” will remain.

 

Message “Email address is not set.”

This is controlled by “NX_SKIP_NO_EMAIL_NOTIFICATION_LOG”.  Setting a value of “1” will suppress writing the error message to the STDLOG:

stdlog entry suppressed:

SDM-SERVER bpnotify_nxd            2936 ERROR        pdm_mail_common.c     1368 Email address is not set. Email Subject(Incident 24 Initial) [rest of notification message omitted]

 

Activity Log entry suppressed:

AHD05377:No email address specified for Contact '[example contact] '.

 

To enable these variables with the 'pdm_options_mgr' command

1. Run the following command on all CA Service Desk Manager servers (this command affects both variables and updates the backend template files):
   

   pdm_options_mgr -c -s SKIP_NO_NOTIFICATION_LOG -v 1 -a pdm_option.inst
   pdm_options_mgr -c -s SKIP_NO_NOTIFICATION_LOG -v 1 -a pdm_option.inst -t
   
   pdm_options_mgr -c -s SKIP_NO_EMAIL_NOTIFICATION_LOG -v 1 -a pdm_option.inst
   pdm_options_mgr -c -s SKIP_NO_EMAIL_NOTIFICATION_LOG -v 1 -a pdm_option.inst -t

2. Recycle CA Service Desk Manager Services
   
   
3. Test

Additional Information

WARNING: You must be confident that the CA SDM contacts mentioned in the STDLOG messages should not be receiving valid notifications.  If you need to diagnose SDM mail notification issues, you may need to re-enable the logging. 

TIP: Test all changes in a non-production environment first. 

Please review KB Article 33653 for further information about the above.