Differences between NOTIFY and SOURCE-NOTIFY

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Notifications in Smarts OI say SOURCE-NOTIFY, but these notifications do not propagate to Smarts SAM
• Smarts OI Notification audit log entries similar to the following are seen:

<Epoch Date> 10-Mar-2022 01:01:44 PM EDT NOTIFICATION-<Notification> <Source> <Device> - Disk Free Space - C: 0 DXA NOTIFY <Device> - Disk Free Space - C: went below threshold of 10 with at trigger 3 out of 3

<Epoch Date> 10-Mar-2022 01:47:05 PM EDT NOTIFICATION-<Notification> <Source> <Device> - Disk Free Space - D: 1 DXA SOURCE-NOTIFY <Device> Disk Free Space - D: went below threshold of 10 with at trigger 3 out of 12

Environment

Smarts 10.1.X, 24.3.X

Resolution

There may be multiple sources for a given notification in Smarts OI/SAM. SOURCE-NOTIFY is used to differentiate the first time a notification becomes active or inactive from those which do not cause a state change, as in the following example: 

Source     Action       Audit entry
------         ------          -----------
source1    notify          NOTIFY
source2    notify          SOURCE-NOTIFY
source2    clear           SOURCE-CLEAR
source1    clear           CLEAR
...

• A SOURCE-NOTIFY will still cause the occurrence count to be incremented for MOMENTARY notifications in OI, and then the same will happen in SAM. 
• When a notification event type is marked as the DURABLE (default) type, the event must clear first and then re-notify before it will increase the count field. If the notification event type is MOMENTARY, the count field will increase every time it is notified, and does not need to be cleared first.

Additional Information

For more information, see the section Notification types and incrementing OccurrenceCount