There is a lot of information out there on SCOM Notifications; however I haven't run into much in the way of Alert Aging. I've been told that Aging was for sending repeat alerts to the same users after a period of time. I have also been told its for Alert Escalations. I have done some testing in my lab over the last couple of days and have found some interesting facts...

Here was my testing scenario:

• 2 Users (User1 and User2)
• two subscriptions set exactly the same, targeted to only send notifications for AD alerts
  • User1 has aging set to 10 minutes,
  • User2 has aging set to 20 minutes

I created a rule to trigger alerts targeted to all Domain Controllers.

What I found was User1 didn't get the first alert for exactly 10 minutes. I left two of the alerts in the New state and set two more alerts to WIP. After 20 minutes User2 got two notifications about the Alerts that were still in the New state. User1 didn't get any repeat notifications.

So I am to assume that Alert Aging is for Escalation of alerts that have not been handled; whether that means auto resolved, self-healed, or manually changed to resolved or some other Resolution state.

Hopefully this will help clarify some of the confusion around Alert Aging (I know it did for me).

Read the complete post at http://david-stclair.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!112A71B19678F08D!158.entry