Repeated old or stale alert notifications in Aria Operations

Products

• VCF Operations

Issue/Introduction

Users receive repeated or stale email notifications for old alerts that may have already been updated or should no longer be triggering new emails.

Symptoms

• Multiple notification emails are sent for the same active alert.
• Alerts updated in previous months continue to send notifications.
• Notifications appear as "stale" rather than reflecting real-time events.

Environment

VMware Aria Operations 8.18.x

Cause

The "Notification heartbeat" setting is enabled within the Notification rule. When active, this feature sends repeat notifications for any alerts that remain in an active state.

Resolution

To stop the repeated delivery of old alerts, disable the notification heartbeat setting:

1. Log in to the Aria Operations UI.
2. Navigate to Operations > Configurations  > Notifications.
3. Locate and edit the impacted Notification Rule.
4. In the rule settings, locate the Notification heartbeat option.
5. Uncheck the Active option
6. Save the changes to the Notification Rule.

For more information on configuring these rules, see Creating Notification Rules for Alerts.

Additional Information

If notifications continue after disabling the heartbeat, verify that the SMTP server is not retrying deliveries due to invalid recipient addresses. See Aria Operations alert emails repeating the delivery for details on SMTP-level issues.