Is it possible to retrieve comments from past acknowledged alarms?

Products

• CA Workload Automation AE - Business Agents (AutoSys)
• CA Workload Automation AE - System Agent (AutoSys)
• CA Workload Automation AE - Scheduler (AutoSys)
• Workload Automation Agent
• CA Workload Automation AE

Issue/Introduction

In the WCC UI, an operator enters a response while acknowledging an Alarm. 
Later on, the operator closes the Alarm without entering a response.

Is the acknowledge comment still available in the database somewhere? 

Environment

Release : 11.3.6

Component : CA Workload Automation AE (AutoSys)

Cause

When closing an Alarm, the state column in the ujo_alarm table changes from 44 to 45 and the response column is overwritten. If no response was entered when closing the Alarm, the response column is still overwritten with a single blank space. The response that had been entered when the Alarm was acknowledged is lost and no longer retrievable.

Resolution

This is working as designed. Essentially, any comment entered at the 'Acknowledge' stage of an Alarm is lost once the Alarm is closed. There is no place to retrieve it from afterwards.

The only action that could be taken to back up the responses from acknowledged Alarms  would be to regularly run a DB query and redirect the responses into a log file before the alarms get closed. It could be done via a job every X minutes.

Example:

SELECT e.event_time_gmt,e.alarm, e.event,e.job_name,a.state,a.response
FROM ujo_proc_event e, ujo_alarm a
WHERE e.eoid = a.eoid
AND a.state = 44
AND length(a.response) > 1 ;

The length part has been added to exclude all the results where the response column is blank.