Activity > Activity types: alerts and tasks |  | next

# Activity types: alerts and tasks

## About alerts

The appliance uses alert messages to report issues with the resources it manages and monitors. The resources generate alerts to notify you that some meaningful event occurred and that an action might be required.

An event describes a single problem or change that occurred on a resource. For example, an event might be an SNMP trap received from a server's (iLO) management processor.

Each alert includes the following information about the event it reports: severity, state, description, and urgency. You can clear alerts, assign owners to alerts, and add notes to alerts.

While alerts have an active or locked state, they contribute to a resource’s overall displayed status. After you change their state to `Cleared`, they no longer affect the displayed status.

| IMPORTANT: The appliance keeps a running count of incoming alerts. At intervals of 500 alert messages, the appliance determines if the number of alerts has reached 75,000. When it does, an auto-cleanup occurs, which deletes alert messages until the total number is fewer than 74,200. When the auto-cleanup runs, it first removes the oldest cleared alerts. Then it deletes the oldest alerts by severity starting with the least severe.

##### More information

Service alerts

## About tasks

All user- or system-initiated tasks are reported as activities:

- User-initiated tasks are created when a user adds, creates, removes, updates, or deletes resources.

- Other tasks are created by processes running on the appliance, such as gathering utilization data for a server.

The task log provides a valuable source of information that you can use to resolve an issue. You can determine the type of task performed, whether the task was completed, when the task was completed, and who initiated the task.

The types of tasks are:

Task type | Description
--- | ---
User | A user-initiated task, such as creating, editing, or removing an enclosure group or a network set
Appliance | An appliance-initiated task, such as updating utilization data
Background | A task performed in the background. This type of task is not displayed in the log.

| IMPORTANT: The appliance maintains a tasks database that holds information for approximately 6 months' worth of tasks or 50,000 tasks. If the tasks database exceeds 50,000 tasks, blocks of 500 tasks are deleted until the count is fewer than 50,000. Tasks older than 6 months are removed from the database. The tasks database and the stored alerts database are separate.

prev | up | next
About monitoring health | home | Activity states

Copyright © 2013, 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP