Resolving heartbeat alerts

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Important

This version of Operations Manager has reached the end of support. We recommend you to upgrade to Operations Manager 2022.

The Health Service sends a heartbeat to a management server to verify that the system is still responding. When a specified number of heartbeats fail to arrive, System Center - Operations Manager displays an alert.

This section shows how to investigate a Health Service Heartbeat Failure alert as an example. Different alerts have different causes and different resolutions.

If you want to walk through these procedures, you can cause this alert by disabling the Microsoft Monitoring Agent service on a test system.

To cause a Health Service heartbeat failure alert for testing

  1. On a computer with an agent installed, open Control Panel.

  2. Double-click Administrative Tools.

  3. Double-click Services.

  4. Right-click the Microsoft Monitoring Agent service, and select Stop.

    Note

    Use this same procedure and select Start in step 4 when you're done testing.

How to investigate agent heartbeat issues

The Monitoring workspace displays active alerts. Looking at an alert provides information and tools to investigate with.

To investigate an active alert

  1. Open the Operations console.

  2. Select Monitoring.

  3. Select Active Alerts to view the Health Service Heartbeat Alert.

    Note

    Depending on the heartbeat interval and the number of missing heartbeats, a few minutes might be required to see the alert.

  4. Select the alert to highlight it and read the information in the Alert Details area. The Alert Details area provides information about the alert, including a description and knowledge about the cause and resolution.

How to troubleshoot agent heartbeat issues

Use the tasks in the Tasks pane to diagnose the cause of the alert. Different alerts have different tasks. For a Health Service Heartbeat Failure alert, the tasks deal with pinging the system and verifying or restarting the service.

To use the action tasks in troubleshooting

  1. In the Tasks pane, under Health Service Watcher Tasks, select Ping Computer. The task opens a dialog to display its progress.

    Note

    If the ping fails, use standard networking troubleshooting to figure out the issue with connectivity. Verify that the system is turned on.

  2. Select Close to close the dialog.

  3. Under Health Service Watcher Tasks, select Computer Management. A Computer Management dialog for the target system opens.

  4. Select Services and Applications to expand it.

  5. Select Services to display services.

  6. Right-click the Microsoft Monitoring Agent service, and select Start.

    Note

    After the connection with the agent is restored, the alert will be automatically resolved and the computer status will return to healthy.

These steps will fix the test failure created in this article, and address many possible causes of a Health Service Heartbeat Failure. If an actual failure isn't resolved by these steps, use standard troubleshooting techniques to figure out the cause of the issue. For instance, the alert displayed in Active Alerts shows how old the alert is. Check for events that happened at this time to see what might have caused an issue.

A sudden increase in the number of alerts is called an alert storm. An alert storm can be a symptom of massive changes of some kind within your management group, such as a catastrophic failure of networks. An alert storm can also be a symptom of configuration issues within Operations Manager. A newly imported management pack starts monitoring immediately. If you have a large number of managed computers, an unforeseen configuration issue could cause a large increase in alerts.

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