How to use Alert levels in Ops Mgr 2007

Ian Blyth has written a very good article on the alert level function in Operations Manager 2007 and compared it to how MOM 2005 used to handle this. The article describes the differences between the 7 Alert levels used in MOM 2005 and compares them to the 3 (Information, Warning and Critical) levels in Ops Mgr 2007. But he also explains how expand the 3 levels to 9 with the use of priority (Low, Medium, High).

If you open the Active Alerts view in SCOM 2007 and try to sort the alerts you will find that it sort on spelling (Critical, Information, Warning)instead of severity. We have created a new view for the operators were we have removed the Information events and the created a new Alerts view with just Informational events, this way the informational events get out of the way for the more importent events. To speed up Alert State Views you can create a view and take away the grouping of severity. This way you have it look moore like MOM 2005 and you get the alerts in orderd in time despite the severity and the fuction in Ops Mgr 2007 that groups the alerts are a performance bootleneck. By the way, I have created an override for all the script and WMI failure events and set them to Information events instead of critical just create a difference between errors and failed monitoring. This way the alert log doesn´t grow that fast.:)