SCOM: Sending notifications for a specific alert

Just raising awareness of this invaluable tool. Stephan Koell brings us an excellent powershell script that fills the gaping hole of not being able to send notification on specific alerts.

As many SCOM admins are already aware, SCOM out of the box only allows you to scope your notification subscriptions by target type, group, and severity. This works for most cases, however every client I've worked with to-date has expressed a need for a notification on a specific email.

Examples:
1. Exchange admins want emails for all exchange alerts, however they only want paged in the middle of the night if the servers go down.

2. A security analist only wants emails when a specific event is generated in the security logs on DC's.

3. A developer only wants to be emailed if the specific application pool for his application goes down.

Not possible via the gui by default. What the powershell linked below gives us is the ability to create a subscription that appears in the console (though cannot be modified) that notifies only when a specific alert name is detected.

I implemented this successfully today for a client, I find that it works best to use a generic recipient name, so you can later add notification channels should more people need the email that is generated.

Several other tips:
- See the comments about altering the script to use your local time zone
- The alert you target when running the PS script MUST have been generated at least once in the past.
- The script out of the box will only watch for alerts generated from monitors. There is a comment that includes a code update to include rules as well, however I have not yet tested that.

http://code4ward.net/cs2/blogs/code4ward/archive/2007/09/19/set-notificationforalert.aspx