Dec 30
How to Troubleshoot Alerts in SharePoint
Sebastian Atar
I'm in my second year with C/D/H and look forward to using my 10+ years of IT experience, along with my MBA background in finance and lean operations to solve business problems.
Most recently, this has involved using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to enable collaboration and sharing of information, as well as Novell Identity Manager to simplify management of user accounts.
When not working, I enjoy spending time with my wife and son. We love visiting family in Seattle and New York. When not traveling, we pass time reading, gardening and BBQ-ing with family.
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Articles by Sebastian Atar
I spent a little time last week troubleshooting alerts for one of our clients. I had built this farm a little over a year ago and all of the sudden, alerts stopped working. To give you some background, the farm is rather simple; 2 WFEs connecting to an enterprise SQL cluster.
Of course, I asked the obvious questions:
1) Is this happening for just a single user or everyone that has subscribed to alerts?
Answer: This is happening to everyone.
2) Did you check your spam filter at the server and your Junk Mail in Outlook?
Answer: Yes, neither place shows “lost” alerts.
3) Is this on new or old alerts?
Answer: Both
First, I connected to Central Administration and validated the outgoing mail server settings by going to “Central Administration > Operations > Outgoing E-Mail Settings” and checking “Outbound SMTP server”.
My next step was to test the mail relay to this server, which simply involves connecting to the mail server via a telnet session on port 25. For details on how to send a test message via telnet, see the following article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/153119.
Not expecting anything to have changed, I connected to one of my WFEs and since the test was successful I proceeded to test by creating another alert, changing an item for which alerts had been configured.
I also found the following article that has a fairly extensive testing process for validating alert functionality: http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2009/03/22/how-to-troubleshoot-alerts-in-wss-3-0-moss.aspx.
As I was stepping through the article, confirming what I had already done, I came to step (k).
I ran the following query on my SQL server:
select * from timerlock
The output confirmed the issue as I saw which of my WFEs was responsible for processing the timer service. It turns out that the relay to their Exchange environment had been changed to include only one of the WFEs. Basically all I needed to do was re-add the relay for the second WFEs and within minutes alerts were flowing.
After the fact, I found this article which explains the process of testing alerts with NetMon to validate what is “going down the pipe”: http://blogs.msdn.com/vedvyas/archive/2009/09/02/troubleshooting-moss-alerts.aspx.
While it did not help in my situation, it would have certainly been helpful had my issue not been the relay but an ACL somewhere in-between my SharePoint farm and the mail server.