Old trap notifications that had been cleared are showing up in the Notification Log Console

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

• Old invalid notifications are reappearing in the Notification Log Console
• Many old trap notifications that had been cleared are showing up in the Notification Log Console

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - SMARTS

Cause

This issue is most likely caused by having traps set to Durable and to Clear On Acknowledge, and they are being cleared in SAM but not in OI.  This can occur when SAM disconnects from OI for a short period of time and when it reconnects, it processes all of the old trap notifications from OI as if they were new notifications because they are still Active in OI.

Resolution

There are many possible workarounds for this issue. Some of these workarounds include the following:

• Set all of your traps to Momentary and give them a long expiration time so they will eventually clear on their own.  This approach needs to be carefully considered because once the traps clear in OI, they will also clear in SAM so you'll want to come up with along enough expiration timer to ensure that all of your trap notifications are looked at before they expire.
• The second solution would be to write a script that would check notifications in OI and see if their corresponding notifications in SAM have been cleared yet or not and then Acknowledge the notification in OI if it was cleared in SAM.
• An immediate workaround to clear out any existing notifications in OI would be to either connect a Notification Log Console to OI and Acknowledge them (assuming they are set to Clear On Acknowledge) or to manually archive them using the following command.

Manually Archive Events in SAM/OI

1. Identify the event(s) you want to archive on your SAM/OI server:  You may want to output the results from the below command to a file as this will make it easier to search for specific notifications.
   
   dmctl -s <OI_DOMAIN> getI ICS_Notification
   
   
2. After identifying a notification you want to archive enter the following (all one line):

dmctl -s <OI_DOMAIN> invoke ICS_NotificationFactory::ICS-NotificationFactory archiveNotification ICS_Notification::<NOTIFICATION> "Manually Archived this notification"